Medical art and science in every country have always progressed in proportion to the general civilization, for the treatment of disease is one of the first and most important manifestations of civilized life. It is therefore natural that the healing art should have flourished earlier in Egypt than elsewhere, that is, in the midst of the oldest civilized people.
There, as in other countries, medicine was practised for some time only by the sacerdotal caste; but not all the members of this caste were doctors and priests at one and the same time; there was a special class among them, called “pastophori,” whose mission it was to cure the sick.
Our knowledge of medicine as practised among the Egyptians of old is now no longer limited to the scanty notices handed down to us by Greek and Roman writers. The researches made by students of Egyptian lore have placed original medical writings in our hands, now already partly interpreted, that permit us to form a sufficiently exact idea of the science of Medicine in ancient Egypt.
These valuable documents, denominated papyri, from the material on which they are written, now exist in great numbers in the Berlin Museum, in the British Museum, and in those of Leyden, Turin, Paris, and other cities; but the most important of the papyri treating of medical subjects is certainly the papyrus of Ebers, in the library of the Leipzig University.[1] This very valuable papyrus—the most ancient of all known works on Medicine—is the best written of all the Egyptian medical papyri, and is also the best preserved and most voluminous. In size it is 30 centimeters high, 20 meters long, and the whole text is divided into 108 sections or pages, each one of about 20 to 22 lines. The celebrated Egyptian scholar, Prof. George Ebers, procured it, toward the beginning of the year 1873, from an inhabitant of Luxor, in Upper Egypt. He published a beautiful edition of it two years later in Leipzig; and in 1890 Dr. Heinrich Joachim published a German translation of the whole papyrus, with an introduction and explanatory notes.
The Ebers’ papyrus is written in hieratic characters. We here reproduce some passages of it, so as to give our readers an idea of the style of writing.[2]
Lepsius and with him the greater part of Egyptologists are of opinion that the Ebers’ papyrus is not an original work at all, but simply a copy of medical writings of still earlier date, belonging to different epochs, and which were collected and reunited to form a kind of manual on medicine.
Part of Ebers’ papyrus in Egyptian hieratic characters containing three dental prescriptions..
From some indications existing in the papyrus itself, Ebers has been able to argue, with quasi certainty, that the papyrus was written toward the year 1550 B.C. But some parts of it have their origin in a far more remote epoch; they go back, that is, to thirty-seven centuries or more before the Christian era. In fact, at page ciii of the Ebers’ papyrus[3] one reads: