I am interested in researching the practice of medicine in ancient Egypt. In my paper I would want to focus on the differences and intersections of medicine and magic as well as their different techniques and remedies they used. Their knowledge of medicine is typically underestimated, and I was surprised about how much they actually knew about the human body, as well as the fact that they performed surgeries and practice things like dentistry and gynecology. In addition to their medical practices, they also used magic and ritual healing to deal with disease and injuries. Most of the archaeological evidence of surgical practice in ancient Egypt comes from medical papyrus and tomb art detailing their practices, tools, and different remedies used.

Medicine and magic were not seen as mutually exclusive. They have been shown to use physicians and surgeons, as well as priests and magicians to help treat illness, often working concurrently even if they had their own separate areas of expertise. The physicians and surgeons even had specialties, like nose doctors or a royal physician referred to as the “guardian of the royal bowel movement” and they had specific deities that were associated with different medical specializations. I also thought it was interesting that, while medicine was a male dominated area, there were female doctors. A notable example of this is a woman named Pereshet who was called the “lady director of lady physicians”.

These physicians and priests are shown to have a lot of understanding about body functions and had an unexpected awareness of the human body. Mummification seems to play into their vast anatomical knowledge. This led them to have a basic understanding of how different organs functioned and were able to develop remedies, usually using natural herbal medicines, to help aid in their function if they were not working correctly. This means that their religion and relationship with the afterlife plays into their knowledge of the human body which led them to develop relatively advanced treatments and medical practices. But at the same time, their reliance on magic and faith may have prevented them from discovering more rational explanations for diseases and could have potentially prevented them from expanding their knowledge.

There is plenty of archaeological evidence of these practices in medical papyri, such as the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus, which detailed 48 different surgical cases and even contains the first description of blood circulation, and the Ebers papyrus, which contains information about over 800 different remedies the ancient Egyptians used. While there are medical papyri describing headaches as related to head trauma and pain, there are other instances of papyri displaying the more magical beliefs held by the ancient Egyptians, describing headaches as the action of demons and the supernatural instead, showing that medicine and magic were not mutually exclusive ideas. These papyri were used to record remedies that the physicians had developed and were passed down to future generations. Some other examples of archaeological evidence in ancient Egypt are, illustrations of circumcision in a tomb at Saqqara and illustrations of copper medical instruments carved on the wall of the Temple of Kom Ombo.

Bibliography

Aboelsoud, N. H.

2010 Herbal medicine in ancient Egypt. Journal of Medicinal Plants Research 4(2): 82–86

Karenberg, Axel, and Christian Leitz

2001 Headache in Magical and Medical Papyri of Ancient Egypt. Cephalalgia 21(9): 911–916

Liddell, K.

2006 Skin disease in antiquity. Clinical Medicine 6(1): 81–86

Sullivan, Richard

1995 A Brief journey into medical care and disease in Ancient Egypt. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 88: 141–145