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History of Medicine
There’s increasing evidence that the
Egyptians were into serious medicine nearly two thousand years before the
Greeks who were supposed to have invented it.
Ancient Egyptian medicine turns out to have been remarkably similar to
modern medicine. Indeed, so advanced
were the Egyptian doctors, that we have to put the origins of modern medicine
hundreds or even thousands of years earlier still.
The origins of
modern medicine
For my part, I see no reason why the ‘spear throwers’ and the ‘Butchers of Boxgrove’
shouldn’t have been in at the beginning of medicine. They were Homo
heidelbergensis, and they were living the Life of Riley, around Heidelberg
and the south coast of England, nearly half a million years ago.
Or why not the Mighty Hunter (Homo erectus) of at least a million years earlier? Despite what some scientists may say, these
guys were already pretty smart. Their
babies were born as helpless as ours are.
So they will have needed stable communities, just like we do, to bring
their kids up safely. Some authorities
reckon that they had fire. Others reckon
that they had ‘language’. (The linguists
get upset if we use the term ‘language’ for such ancient peoples. Perhaps we should call it ‘communication’
instead. It comes to much the same
thing.) With all that going for them,
how could they not have discovered the value of at least a few herbs?
With tongue-in-cheek we can go back even
further. We read that many animals know
which herbs to eat when they are feeling rough. We can imagine our earliest forebears being at
least as knowledgeable as these animals.
As time passed, and their brains grew, they
will surely have started to expand this ‘instinctive’ knowledge into the first
glimmerings of a medical practice. When
might this have been? We’ll probably
never know.
We’re talking about herbal medicine to be
sure. But until the discovery of
antibiotics, which was well into my lifetime, herbal products were the basis of
much of our medicine too. Perhaps they
still are. I remember a retired GP
saying that he used to keep four large bottles of medicines on a shelf in his
surgery. If the first one didn’t help
the patient, then one of the others probably would. Pharmacists didn’t tell you what was in your
medicine in those days, which was just as well.
These four bottles simply contained different coloured suspensions of
aspirin. And what is aspirin? Artificial willow bark!
Even today, biologists are scouring the
tropical rain forests, looking for new drugs that might be useful to us humans
(more).
Ancient Egyptian medicine
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that the
ancients homed in on much the same medicines as we did, for two reasons. First, as we keep having to point out,
ancient folk were smart too. Second, the
ailments will have been the same, and so will the properties of the herbs.
I make no claim that this piece is either
comprehensive or authoritative. But,
according to New Scientist (15.12.07),
Jackie Campbell of the
Historians know all about ancient Greek
medicine, because they wrote huge amounts – and all in plain Greek.
By contrast, the Egyptians did what modern
medicos did until recently, only worse.
They wrote in their own private language, that even scholars are 
having great difficulty with.
This is an example, taken from the N.S.
article. It’s part of a papyrus from
about 3˝ thousand years ago (1500 BC).
It contains 877 prescriptions. By
this time Egyptian medicine was already very sophisticated. It must have taken their doctors a long time
to home in on such high quality, by pure trial end error. So, as we’ve already suggested, it roots must
have gone back a long way.
Linguists have been making heroic efforts to
translate papyri like this one for over a hundred years. But the normal code-breaking strategies don’t
work on simple lists of ingredients. And
the ingredients list is the most vital part of any prescription.
As a result, over 30% of the linguists’ ‘educated
guesses’ are disputed. This is far too
many errors for the results to be of much use to anybody else. We engineers would cancel a project if we
couldn’t find a way of getting much better initial data than that.
Fortunately,
Further research will reveal how accurate
Campbell’s results are. But the New scientist thought the story well
worth an airing. And that’s good enough
for me.
Campbell started by investigating which
plants grew, or were traded, at the time.
Fortunately the flora of ancient Egypt is well known. And this enabled her to rule out a number of
the linguists’ guesses. For example,
cinnamon and aniseed were both cited, but it’s almost certain that neither was
available to the doctors of the time.
Next she looked at the recipes
themselves. Quite apart from not being
available, cinnamon and aniseed don’t do what the translated recipe says
anyway. Other ingredients were clearly
wrong too.
However many of the recipes were spot
on. First, the active drug was to be
extracted in a way that works. There’s
often only one way to do this. The
active ingredient in the bitter apple (a powerful laxative) can only be
obtained by steeping the fruit in mild alcohol.
That’s how it’s done today, and that’s how the Egyptians did it. Others need a two stage process, first in
water or alcohol, and then in acid. The
Egyptians did it this way, and so do we.
Some herbs need boiling and others
need grinding up first, and so on. We
know this and so did the Egyptians.
Second, the formulation did what the
recipe said it did. Campbell found that
67% of her Egyptian remedies complied with the ‘1973 British Pharmaceutical
Codex’. This is the bible that, until
very recently, told pharmacists which medicines to make up for which ailment –
and how to do it. The only proviso is
that the Egyptians knew nothing about the need for sterility.
Third, the drug was given ‘the right way’
(arrogant lot aren’t we these days). The
Egyptians couldn’t inject their drugs.
But they had virtually all the other techniques available to modern
doctors, from eye drops and inhalers to enemas and suppositories.
Fourth, in many cases even the dosage was
‘right’. Not always though. Often the dose seemed too small to be
effective. There’s an explanation for
this. Plants don’t produce these poisons
for fun. They do it, at considerable
‘cost’ to themselves, to fight off diseases and predators. The wild herbs that the Egyptians used were
still under attack. So they had to keep
their defences up. Modern cultivated
varieties are generally grown in a much more benign environment. So they could have lost a lot of their
potency down the centuries.
On the other hand the Egyptians knew
little about the causes of disease. So
their medicine concentrated on alleviating symptoms. We shouldn’t belittle them for this though. Much of modern medicine is the same.
The Egyptians may not have known anything
about infection, but they did know that resins and metals helped healing. We now know that both of these are toxic to
bugs. Their treatment of wounds was
clearly effective. Many mummies show
signs of potentially fatal wounds – which had instead healed. They also treated their wounds with
honey. Don’t laugh. Honey is coming back into favour as
antibiotics increasingly fail. Its
effect is to dry the wound out so much that bacteria can’t grow.
Not all their remedies were effective
though. Their cure for impotence comprised
39 different ingredients, not one of which would have had the slightest
effect. However we mustn’t forget the
placebo effect, which is still a major part of medicine today. Their contraceptives might have worked. One was animal dung which is acid. It might have been effective if inserted as a
suppository. Somehow I can’t see us
checking that one out!
All in all we could have done a lot worse
than to have lived in ancient Egyptian times, if we had money that is. But there are plenty of countries today where
lack of money denies you access to medical care.
©C B Pease, January 08