Superstitious notions in connection with medicine are not more apparent in the Ebers Papyrus than they are in any English herbal of three or four hundred years ago. The majority of the drugs prescribed are of vegetable origin, but there is a fair proportion of animal products, and as in comparatively modern pharmacopœias these seem to have been valued as remedies in the ratio of their nastiness. Lizards’ blood, teeth of swine, putrid meat, stinking fat, moisture from pigs’ ears, milk from a lying-in woman; the excreta of adults, of children, of donkeys, antelopes, dogs, cats, and other animals, and the dirt left by flies on the walls, are among the remedies met with in the papyrus.
Among the drugs named in the papyrus and identified are oil, wine, beer (sweet and bitter), beer froth, yeast, vinegar, turpentine, various gums and resins, figs, sebestens, myrrh, mastic, frankincense, opium, wormwood, aloes, cummin, peppermint, cassia, carraway, coriander, anise, fennel, saffron, sycamore and cyprus woods, lotus flowers, linseed, juniper berries, henbane, and mandragora.
There are certain substances, evidently metals by the suffixes, but they have not been exactly identified. Neither gold, silver, nor tin is included. One is supposed to be sulphur, another, electrum (a combination of gold and silver), and another alluded to as “excrement divine,” remains mysterious. Iron, lead, magnesia, lime, soda, nitre and vermilion are among the mineral products which were then used in medicine.
It need hardly be said that scores of drugs named have only been guessed at, and in regard to a number of them, it has not been possible to get as far as this.
Most of the prescriptions are fairly simple, but there are exceptions. There is a poultice with thirty-five ingredients. Here is a specimen of rather complicated pharmacy. It is ordered for what seems to have been a common complaint of the stomach called setyt. Seeds of the sweet woodruff, seeds of mene, and the plant called A’am, were to be reduced to powder and mixed. Then seven stones had to be heated at a fire. On these, one by one, some of the powder was to be sprinkled while the stone was hot; it was then covered with a new pot in the bottom of which a hole had been made. A reed was fitted to the hole and the vapour inhaled. “Afterwards eat some fat,” says the writer.
Reduced Facsimile of a page of the Papyrus Ebers.
The Papyrus Ebers has been reproduced by photography in facsimile, and published in two magnificent volumes by Mr. Wilhelm Engelmann, of Leipzig. Mr. Engelmann has kindly permitted me to copy one of the pages from his work for this book. The above is a reduced reproduction of page 47 of the Papyrus. The photograph was taken at the British Museum.
The first line of this page is the end of the instructions for applying a mixture of powders rubbed down with date wine to wounds and skin diseases to heal them. That compound was made by the god Seb, the god of the earth, for the god Ra. Then follows a complicated prescription devised by the goddess Nut, the goddess of heaven, also for the god Ra, and like the last to apply to wounds. It prescribes brickdust, pebble, soda, and sea-salt, to be boiled in oils with some groats and other vegetable matter. Isis next supplies a formula to relieve Ra of pains in the head. It contains opium, coriander, absinth, juniper berries, and honey. This was to be applied to the head. Three other formulas for pains in the head, the last for a pain on one side of the head (migraine), are given, and then there is a break in the manuscript, and afterwards some interesting instructions are given for the medicinal employment of the ricinus (degm) tree. The stems infused in water will make a lotion which will cure headache; the berries chewed with beer will relieve constipation; the berries crushed in oil will make a woman’s hair grow; and pressed into a salve will cure abscesses if applied every morning for ten days. The paragraph ends (but on the next page), as many of them do, with the curious idiom, “As it shall be a thousand times.” The translation is given in full (in German) in Dr. Joachim’s Papyros Ebers. Das älteste Buch über Heilkunde (Berlin, Georg. Reimer. 1890).
To draw the blood from a wound:—Foment it four times with a mixture made from wax, fat, date wine, honey, and boiled horn; these ingredients boiled with a certain quantity of water.
To prevent the immoderate crying of children a mixture of the seeds of the plant Sheben with some fly-dirt is recommended. It is supposed that Sheben may have been the poppy. Incidentally it is remarked that if a new-born baby cries “ny” that is a good sign; but it is a bad sign if it cries “mbe.”