Ancient Egyptian medicine

Ancient Egypt left behind one of the oldest written medical traditions in the world. As early as the Old Kingdom, more than 4,500 years ago, physicians are mentioned by name. Around 2600 BCE Hesy-Ra held the title “chief of dentists”, and Peseshet is named as “overseer of the women physicians”.

The main sources are medical papyri. The Kahun Papyrus, from around 1800 BCE, deals with women’s medicine. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, from around 1600 BCE and a copy of an even older text, describes injuries from head to torso in a strikingly sober order: examination, diagnosis, and the verdict on whether an injury can be treated. The Ebers Papyrus, from around 1550 BCE, has 110 pages with some 700 to 800 recipes, arranged by organ and complaint.

Egyptian medicine impressed its neighbours. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Egypt was full of physicians, each specialising in a single ailment. The architect Imhotep, who lived around 2650 BCE, was worshipped centuries later as a god of healing, and the Greeks saw in him their own Asclepius.

Egyptians saw the heart as the centre of the body. From the heart ran channels, metu, that carried blood, air, tears, semen and also disease. If these channels became blocked, a person fell ill. That is why laxatives and purges received a great deal of attention.

Practical treatment and the supernatural were intertwined. Illness could have a natural cause, but could also come from an evil spirit, a dead person or an angry deity. A recipe therefore often went together with a spell, and an amulet was as much part of care as an ointment.

Yet there was also room for sober judgement. The Edwin Smith Papyrus divides injuries into three groups: ailments the physician will treat, ailments he will contend with, and ailments he will not treat.

There were different kinds of healers. The swnw was the physician in general. The priests of Sekhmet, the lioness goddess who could both bring and take away disease, worked as physicians and exorcists. There were also makers of amulets and spells.

Knowledge was kept and passed on in the Per Ankh, the “House of Life”: scriptoria attached to temples where texts were copied and studied. Many medical papyri are copies of older texts, which shows how long this knowledge was handed down.

Physicians worked for temples, the court and also for labourers. From Deir el-Medina, the village of the builders of the royal tombs, records survive of absence from work through illness and of a physician who attended the workers.

The Ebers Papyrus, from around 1550 BCE, is the largest medical papyrus. It covers stomach complaints, skin diseases, eye diseases and wounds, among other things, and contains a section on the heart and its channels. It is kept in Leipzig.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, from around 1600 BCE, is regarded as the oldest known surgical text. It describes 48 cases of injury and is remarkably free of magic. It is kept in New York. The Kahun Papyrus, from around 1800 BCE, deals with fertility, pregnancy and women’s complaints.

Of the healers themselves we mainly know titles and names from tombs: Hesy-Ra, Peseshet, and Imhotep, who was deified much later.

The papyri are important sources for the history of medicine, but not a living tradition. Modern healthcare in Egypt and elsewhere in Africa does not descend in an unbroken line from ancient Egypt, and it is misleading to present them as one system.

Researchers now look at the recipes with modern eyes. Some ingredients have demonstrable properties: honey inhibits bacteria on wounds. Other recipes contain substances we now consider unsuitable or dangerous, such as animal dung.

Imhotep lives on as a symbol: from a historical architect he grew in the imagination into the “first physician”, a role that arose mostly later.

The Egyptian pharmacy came from the Nile valley, the desert and trade. Well-known plant remedies are garlic and onion, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, juniper and oil from the seeds of the castor plant, castor oil, which served as a laxative.

Resins were precious and often came from far away: frankincense and myrrh from the Land of Punt, on the Horn of Africa. They were used in ointments, incense and embalming. The blue lotus had great religious significance and is often depicted.

Besides plants there were honey, fat, milk, natron, minerals such as malachite for eye paint, and animal products. A recipe was usually a mixture, with beer, wine or honey as a carrier.

Read the old recipes as history, not as advice. They come from a world with different knowledge and different materials, and some are downright harmful.

Be careful, too, about romanticising “Egyptian wisdom”. Egyptian medicine deserves appreciation for what it really was: an early system, partly sober and partly magical, made by people who looked carefully and wrote things down.