In 1836, Calcutta Medical College set off what Surgeon H. H. Goodeve called “the most important blow at the roof of native prejudices” by opening its doors to Brahmin and Rajput students for human dissection. The momentous act fell to Pandit Madhusudan Gupta—a vaidyā trained in Western and Ayurvedic medicine—who, on either 10 January or 28 October, led four students in Asia’s first public cadaver dissection. So proud were the British of this breakthrough that they celebrated with a fifty‑round gun salute from Fort William, as though they’d conquered superstition itself rather than simply peeled back a body’s layers .
Yet decades later, Professor R. Havelock Charles would remind Calcutta that Gupta was not alone: eleven courageous students had cast aside caste taboos to handle the corpse, only to be forgotten in history’s telling. Their anonymity raises a critical question: should we lionize a single “first dissector,” or remember the collective leap into modern medicine that truly reshaped India’s healing traditions?
This kaleidoscopic glimpse reveals how a single scalpelling act in old Calcutta—hailed with military honors—marked both a medical milestone and a cultural rupture, laying the groundwork for Western anatomy in India while exposing the untold sacrifices behind the city’s first cutting‑edge discoveries.
Sources
- Bhattacharya, J. (2011). The first dissection controversy: introduction to anatomical education in Bengal and British India. Current Science, 101(9), 1227-1232.
- Mitra, Rathin. (2007). Hidden Calcutta. Calcutta: Ina Mitra.
- Soham Chandra
Arup K. Chatterjee 