Early Hindu medicine belongs to the Brahman period (800 BC-AD 1000).

The people of Indus Valley Civilization, even from the early Harappan periods (c. 3300 BC), had knowledge of medicine and dentistry. Later research in the same area found evidence of teeth having been drilled, dating back 9,000 years.

Ayurveda (the science of living), is the literate, scholarly system of medicine that originated over 2000 years ago in South Asia. Its two most famous texts belong to the schools of Caraka and Susruta.

While these writings display some limited continuities with very ancient medical ideas known from the religious literature called the Veda, historians have been able to demonstrate direct historical connections between early Ayurveda and the early literature of the Buddhists and Jains.

The earliest foundations of Ayurveda were built on a synthesis of selected ancient herbal practices dating back to the early second millennium BC, together with a massive addition of theoretical conceptualizations, new nosologies and new therapies dating from about 400 BC onwards, and coming out of the communities of thinkers who included the Buddha and others.