Long before Europe knew about medicine, long before the names that fill Western medical textbooks had been born, a physician in the ancient city of Varanasi was already operating. He reconstructed damaged noses using skin taken from the forehead. He described more than 300 distinct surgical procedures and catalogued 124 surgical instruments. He insisted his students practice on inanimate objects before they touched a living body. He wrote about sterility, about ethics, about the duty of the healer to the patient. He put all of it down in a text — the Sushruta Samhita — that stands, by any honest reckoning, as the world's first systematic treatise on surgery. His name was Sushruta. He lived approximately 2,600 years ago. And on June 19, a 90-kilogram bronze likeness of him was unveiled at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh — an institution that has been training surgeons since 1505, that counts over 33,000 members across 140 countries, and that is recognised as one of the most distinguished surgical bodies on earth. The statue now stands near the staircase leading to the college's Playfair Hall — the very passage through which surgical fellows walk to receive their degrees. Every newly qualified surgeon who climbs those stairs will pass Sushruta. It is a placement that feels less like decoration and more like a statement.
One Family's Long Campaign
The statue did not come about through institutional initiative. It arrived because of one man's years of persistent, quietly determined effort — and his family's willingness to back it. Professor Chandra Cheruvu, a UK-based surgeon of Telugu origin, organised the unveiling through his Cheruvu Family Foundation, which donated the statue to the college. His family roots are in Peravali, a village near Tenali in Andhra Pradesh, where for over six centuries his ancestors provided free herbal medical care to local people. His late father, Dr. C.S. Shastri, was a respected surgeon in Vijayawada. Cheruvu himself trained at Andhra Medical College and Manipal before moving to the UK in 1991, where he went on to earn four fellowship qualifications from the Royal Colleges of Surgeons in England, Edinburgh and Glasgow — an unusual and demanding achievement. The bronze statue was not made in Britain. It was cast at Swamimalai, near Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu's Thanjavur district — one of India's most ancient centres of bronze craft, whose artisans, known as sthapathis, have been practising the traditional lost-wax method since the time of the Chola dynasty. The Swamimalai bronze tradition carries a Geographical Indication tag from the Government of India, a recognition of its irreplaceable cultural heritage. The statue's origins are as Indian as the man it honours. Its destination — the heart of one of the oldest surgical institutions in the Western world — is as international as Sushruta's legacy deserved to become. The ceremony brought together Siddharth Malik, India's Consul General in Edinburgh, Professor Clare McNaught, the current President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Professor Rowan Parks, a former President, and Professor Marc Halpern, Founder of the California College of Ayurveda, along with medical professionals and dignitaries from India, the UK and the United States.
What Sushruta Actually Did
It is worth pausing on the substance, because the achievement is easily understated. The rhinoplasty technique Sushruta described — rebuilding a damaged or lost nose using a flap of skin drawn down from the forehead — is not a historical footnote. The essential principle of that procedure is still used by plastic surgeons today, roughly 2,600 years after he first wrote it down. His ethical framework for medicine — the physician's obligations to the patient, the standards of conduct expected before and during surgery — predates the Hippocratic tradition that Western medicine regards as its own founding moral code. The Sushruta Samhita brought together general surgery, plastic surgery, orthopaedics, gynaecology, toxicology and urology into a single, organised body of knowledge at a time when much of the world had not yet begun to think systematically about the human body at all. To accompany the unveiling, Professor Cheruvu also released a book — Maharshi Sushruta: A Compendium — Father of Surgery — drawing on contributions from 36 specialists in Ayurveda and modern medicine from across the world, making the case in rigorous, evidence-based terms for why Sushruta's methods remain not merely historically interesting but clinically relevant.
More Than a Statue
The college also announced the establishment of an annual Sushruta Lectureship, funded through a donation by Professor Vadrevu K. Raju, which the college said would explore the broader dimensions of medicine and surgery beyond technical expertise alone. Separately, the Cheruvu Professional Development Grants were established to support surgeon training and observerships — a practical, forward-looking investment in the next generation of surgical education that sits alongside the historical recognition the statue represents. The Royal College's own statement was measured but meaningful, describing the statue as an addition to its Heritage Collection that recognises "the rich and diverse traditions that have shaped medicine and surgery across cultures and centuries." India's Consulate in Scotland described the ceremony as a celebration of ancient Indian medical heritage and of the historical ties between India and Scotland in medicine and surgery.
A Moment for Reflection
The reaction in India has ranged from straightforward pride to something more complicated. Several commentators noted the irony — a Scottish institution honouring Sushruta with a permanent statue while Indian medical universities have yet to do the same. "When a foreign institution honours Sushruta with a statue," one observer wrote, "it raises a question: why do we so often wait for global recognition before valuing our own legends?" It is a fair question. But the more immediate truth is simpler: a 90-kilogram bronze figure, cast by sthapathi artisans in Swamimalai using a technique unchanged since the Chola era, now stands in one of the oldest and most respected homes of surgical learning in the Western world. Not as a diplomatic courtesy. Not as a cultural exhibit. As a permanent member of an institution's heritage collection — and as a silent presence on the staircase that every newly minted surgeon must climb.
That story, Edinburgh has now formally acknowledged, did not begin in Europe.
