Three ancient work, viz. the Carakasamhita the Susrutasamhita and the Astangahrdaya are considered to be the three basic and authoritative works of the Ayurvedic tradition. Their respective authors, Caraka, Susruta and Vagbhata are, therefore, haloed names in the field of Indic medicine. They flourished a hoary past, a few centuries prior to the Christian era and their works have since been reorganized, edited and redacted, several times, by their successors in tradition, keeping pace with the progress of the science of healing. Some of those later authorities were conferred the titles of ?Caraka?, ?Susruta? and ?Vagbhata? in recognition of their contribution to the development of the text they worked with. This state of affairs has made it extremely difficult to reconstruct the biographical details and to ascertain the dates of the ancient authors who originally wrote these treatises. The Ayurvedic literature is vast and has an uninterrupted continuity of at least two thousand five hundred years. Innumerable classical and medieval authors contributed to its development. A complete survey of the literature which may help to trace the development of the science on the one hand and the influence and indebtedness of the successive authors on the other was, therefore, a desideratum.