Ancient Egyptian medicine

Medicine was a branch of advanced scribal learning. Egyptian doctors were of the highest social status and had a reputation throughout the ancient world. A knowledge of medicine was identified with a knowledge of ritual. However, although the physician acted as a specialized ritualist, this should not be taken to imply that recitation took priority over therapeutic practice.
    Surviving medical papyri, which belong to textual tradition stretching back to Middle Kingdom, were intended for both teaching and reference. For example, in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus dating to the late Middle Kingdom or slightly later, individual cases are described and their symptoms listed, together with specific findings from physical examinations. A diagnosis is given, together with a prognosis – curable, treatable, or untreatable – and treatment, if appropriate, is described.
    Most medical texts consist of series of prescriptions – recipes for the treatment of every possible sort of ailment. Modern analysis of the efficacy of such prescriptions is at times complicated by difficulties in identifying both the ailments and the ingredients used in the cure. Some ingredients seem to rely more on sympathetic magic than pharmacology. Yet is clear that medicine was also practiced on a scientific basis.
  

Two documents (the Ebers and Berlin medical papyri) provide an account of the interconnection of the parts of the body by “vessels”, a term applied to veins, arteries, ducts, muscles and tendons. The heart was at the centre, and the vessels were understood to transfer air, blood and other fluids, as well as disease, to different parts of the body. The papyri also exhibit a good practical knowledge of the structure of the body, its organs and their functions, but there is no evidence for a more formalized study of anatomy. Nor is there evidence to suggest that medical practice was based on any knowledge of the human anatomy derived from the processes of mummification or butchery: internal surgery was not under-taken, and there was little practical motivation for such study.
    To the modern observer, the use of “magic” appears in direct propor-tion to the limitations of other available treatments. Spells to charm snakes, and to prevent as well as cure of alleviate snake bites, are common. However, on papyrus identifies the snakes of Egypt, gives an analysis and prognosis of their bites, and lists detailed prescriptions and treatments, with only limited use of magical incantations.
   Gynaecology and childbirth were an ancient Egyptian specialty. For conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and welfare of the new child, divine assistance was more useful than human, and while practical treatments for gynaecological problems are found in many of the papyri, there are also extensive collections of charms and incantations for birth, protection of babies and satisfactory provision of milk, as well as spells against child-hood diseases and dangers . Several deities, such as Isis and Hathor, were invoked to help women to conceive and to bear children safely.

DIGNOSIS AND CURE

The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus provides a systematic  analysis of injuries and their treatment. From the nature of the injuries, it was once thought to be the work of an army surgeon, but some scholars now attribute it to a doctor attached to a pyramid construction team. If this is so, the wounds listed are probably the results of on-site accidents. On case, “a man with a wound above his eyebrow, reaching to the bone”, is to be treated in the following manner: “You probe his wound, and you bring together his gash for him with a stitch [?], and you say about him: ‘… An injury I will deal with.’ After you stitch [?] it, you bandage it up with fresh meat the first day. If you find that this wound is loose with its stitches [?], then you bind it together with bandages, and anoint it with oil and honey every day until it gets better.”
   Not every injury was curable, however, as in the case of the unfortunate man partially paralysed following a fracture of the skull: “If … you find that swellings protrude behind the break in his skull, and his eye is squinting under it, on the side that has the blow to his skull, and he walks shuffling with the sole of his foot on the side that has the blow to his skull, you diagnose him as one struck by what enters from outside ... An injury not treated.” The phrase “what enters from outside” is explained: “It is the breath of god, or death.”