I-em-hotep and Ancient Egyptian medicine: II. Prevention of valvular disease / The Harveian Oration delivered before the Royal college of physicians on June 21, 1904

by Richard Caton

Testimonies as to I-em-hotep

I-em-hotep rises before us as one of those intellectual giants who take all knowledge for their province. In his comprehensiveness he surpasses Leonardo da Vinci or our own Linacre; he is distinguished as a physician, a minister of the king, a priest, a writer, an architect, an alchemist, and an astronomer—great in all, but greatest in medicine; so eminent that in the view of Egypt he is a god.

PLATE II
The Temple of Edfu
The earliest portions of which are believed to have been built by I-em-hotep.

PLATE III
The Step-pyramid of Sakkara
Supposed to have been built by I-em-hotep for the Pharaoh Tosorthros.

In the reign of Tosorthros, of the third dynasty, five or six thousand years ago, we meet with the wise I-em-hotep in an inscription referring to the seven years of famine which befell Egypt in consequence of a succession of low Niles. He is there the adviser of Pharaoh; to him the king applies in his trouble for counsel and help.[8] In the inscriptions in the temple of Edfu[9] he is described at length as the great priest I-em-hotep, the son of Ptah, who speaks or lectures.[10] Perhaps his discourses or lectures were on medicine. Elsewhere he is described as the writer of the divine books. It may here be remarked that probably Ebers’ papyrus was one of the six divine books attributed to Thoth ceremonially, but not improbably in large part the work of I-em-hotep. Manetho, while speaking of his eminence as a physician, refers to him also as an architect, the first to build with hewn stone.[11] Not improbably he built the step pyramid of Sakkara, the tomb of his patron Tosorthros.[12] Manetho also suggests that I-em-hotep improved and completed the hieroglyphic script of Egypt. In the Hermetic literature he is famed for his knowledge of astronomy or astrology; the Westcar papyrus describes him further as an alchemist and magician.[13] These powers were always associated with medicine, and even to-day in the popular view they are not entirely dissociated from it. What share I-em-hotep may have had in those early discoveries of the movement of the blood, to which I am about to advert, we do not know. It does, however, seem clear that either through the labours of I-em-hotep or of other priest physicians, the Egyptians had discovered certain elementary facts and knew as much as the Greeks, as much as we find in the Hippocratic writings, or in those of Aristotle and the later Alexandrian school, and the hypothesis seems a natural one that the knowledge possessed by the Greeks was acquired from Egypt.