Episode 22 Medicine: the Necessary Art
The History of Ancient Egypt
Professor Robert Brier
Film Review
In ancient Egypt, most physicians (and most scribes) were priests associated with temples. Aside from members of the government bureaucracy, they were the only literate members of Egyptian society. Inhotep, the royal architect who built the first step pyramid (see Sneferu: The First Egyptian Pyramid Builder), was also a physician and subsequently became a god associated with the Greek God Aesculapius. Many physicians belonged to temples dedicated to Tof, who would become the god Hermes in Greek mythology. Isis is also associated with healing and the laying on of hands.
Tof
Sekhmet, a woman with the head of a lioness, was the Egyptian goddess of medicine. According to Egyptian mythology, Ra decided to send Sekhmet to wipe out mankind and Tof (the god with an Ibis head) who invented writing got her drunk so she forgot about destroying humanity.
Tof is also associated with healing, known as wab (“purification”) in Egyptian. When Horus the son of Osiris lost his eye in his battle with Set (see The Ancient Egyptian Origin Myth ), Tof restored it by magic. In another myth he saved the infant Horus’s life after he was stung by a scorpion.
Sleeping in the temple at Dendera enabled physicians to dream the solution to your illness. People also sought the water cure (the origin of holy water) there, curing themselves by pouring water over themselves that had dripped over the statue of Horus. The temple the female king Hatsheput built in Thebes had a clinic on the roof and temple inscriptions detail patient experiences.
Exorcism was another common treatment, especially for blindness, which was caused by the gods. Most infections were treated with magic spells. One treatment for plague was to burn the bed linens. The treatment to make an old man a youth again was to give him wrinkle cream.
The skill of Egyptian physicians, frequently sought out by other Mediterranean countries, may have been related to their expertise in mummification. Unlike the ancient Greeks, the Egyptians allowed dissection of the dead.
Medicine was one of the few areas of knowledge preserved on papyri. The Edwin Smith surgical papyrus (from around 1700 BC) deals mainly with trauma (mainly broken bones). It lists 48 types of trauma starting with the head. It explains how to immobilize limbs via splinting, as well a offering a magical treatment (for frontal skull injury): grinding up an ostrich shell and painting your head with it.
The Papyrus Ebers (from around 1500 BC) lists 800 remedies, including rubbing a head injury with fish oil and wrapping a sore foot with a deer skin (because deer are really fast runners).
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The Most Revolutionary Act 