The Father of Surgery Comes Home to the House of Surgeons
A 90-kg bronze of Maharishi Sushruta, cast by the temple sculptors of Swamimalai, now stands in the heritage heart of the 521-year-old Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh — the gift of a Telugu-origin surgeon, Prof Chandra VN Cheruvu, who paired the statue with a scholarly compendium, travelling scholarships, and development grants that turn symbolism into living legacy.
On the stairwell that leads to the Playfair Hall of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCSEd), every newly admitted fellow now walks past a figure who practised their craft some two and a half millennia before the College was founded. On 19 June 2026, a 90-kilogram bronze statue of Maharishi Sushruta — revered across the surgical world as the Father of Surgery — was formally unveiled at the world’s oldest continuously operating surgical college, established in 1505.
The moment carried an unmistakable sense of history closing a circle. An institution that has shaped Western surgical practice for over five centuries chose to place, at the very threshold of its most ceremonial space, the image of an ancient Indian surgeon whose treatise described rhinoplasty, cataract couching and fracture management when much of the world had no written surgery at all. Every graduating cohort at RCSEd will now encounter Sushruta as part of the ritual of entering the profession.
A Surgeon Twenty-Five Centuries Ahead
Sushruta’s principal text, the Sushruta Samhita, traditionally dated to around the sixth century BCE, is one of the earliest comprehensive manuals of operative surgery known to humanity. It catalogues more than 300 surgical procedures and over 120 surgical instruments, and lays out something modern medicine would take centuries to institutionalise: structured surgical training, cadaveric study, ethical codes for practitioners, and detailed operative technique described step by step.
His account of forehead-flap nasal reconstruction — the ancestor of modern rhinoplasty — remains the most celebrated example, and contemporary reviews in peer-reviewed literature routinely acknowledge him as the Father of Surgery, or of plastic surgery specifically. What Edinburgh has now done is move that acknowledgment from the pages of journals into the physical heritage of one of surgery’s most prestigious institutions.
Cast in Swamimalai, Installed in Edinburgh
The statue itself embodies a second, quieter story of Indian scientific heritage: metallurgy. It was crafted in Swamimalai, Tamil Nadu — a town whose sthapathi lineages have cast temple bronzes for over a thousand years — using the ancient lost-wax (cire perdue) method in a single bronze casting. Master craftsman Raghavanantham Sthapathi led the artisan team, working entirely by hand in the traditional South Indian iconographic style.
The result is a striking convergence: a ritual bronze born of Chola-era casting technique, standing amid the Georgian architecture of the Playfair Building, honouring a surgeon whose instruments were forged in iron age India. Craft, science and memory meet in a single object.
The Cheruvu Legacy: A Son’s Tribute, A Civilisation’s Claim
The initiative was conceived and led by Professor Chandra V.N. Cheruvu, a Telugu-origin surgeon from Andhra Pradesh who serves as Consultant Gastrointestinal Surgeon at University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust in the UK. The statue was donated through the Cheruvu Family Foundation, and the entire project — statue, book, scholarships — is dedicated to the memory of his father, the late Dr. C.S. Sastry, himself a physician.
That intergenerational thread gives the project its emotional weight. This is diaspora philanthropy of a deliberate and layered kind: not a plaque or a one-off donation, but a permanent heritage object, an academic record, and funded pathways for future surgeons — each element reinforcing the others, each connecting a family’s story of medical service to a civilisational narrative of Indian science.
More Than a Statue: The Compendium and the Scholarships
Launched alongside the unveiling was Maharishi Sushruta: A Compendium – Father of Surgery, an international scholarly volume brought together by Professor Cheruvu, compiling historical, textual and clinical perspectives on Sushruta and the Samhita from surgeons, historians of medicine and Ayurveda scholars. The book is significant precisely because it is evidence-based: RCSEd’s acceptance of both the statue and the compendium amounts to an institutional acknowledgment of Sushruta’s place in world surgical history, grounded in scholarship rather than sentiment.
The living component of the legacy is financial and educational. Two permanent annual Traveling Surgical Scholarships, established in Dr. Sastry’s memory, will support surgeons undertaking training, conferences and observerships across borders. Separately, RCSEd has announced the Cheruvu Professional Development Grants in Surgery and Orthopaedic Surgery, open to members of the College, with the inaugural application round closing on 3 August 2026. In effect, Sushruta’s ancient insistence on structured apprenticeship and continuous learning has been converted into modern grant instruments at a college of more than 33,000 members across 140 countries.
Diplomacy on a Stairwell
The unveiling ceremony reflected the event’s significance for India–UK relations. Siddharth Malik, Consul General of India in Edinburgh, joined RCSEd President Professor Clare McNaught in unveiling the statue, with former College President Professor Rowan Parks and Professor Marc Perry, founder of the California College of Ayurveda, among the dignitaries. Guests from the UK, India and the USA attended, and Indian diplomatic missions framed the occasion as a landmark in India–Scotland medical collaboration.
The diplomatic messaging matters. Recognition of non-Western medical pioneers by elite Western institutions has historically been slow and grudging; here it was formal, public and permanent. For Indian and diaspora surgeons, the statue offers something rarer than pride — the sight of their civilisational inheritance built into the fabric of a global institution they themselves belong to.
The Long View
There is a fitting symmetry in the location. Edinburgh was one of the crucibles of modern scientific surgery — the city of the Monros, of Lister’s antisepsis, of the anatomy schools that trained generations of surgeons for the world. That this city’s surgical college should now honour a practitioner from ancient India acknowledges what medical historians have long argued: that surgery’s story does not begin in Europe. It begins, in its earliest documented and most systematic form, on the Indian subcontinent, with a teacher who insisted that a surgeon must have the courage of a lion, the eye of a hawk — and the hand that does not tremble.
Twenty-five centuries on, in a stairwell in Scotland, that hand has been cast in bronze.
Vamsi Priya Potharaju
