The Invention Of Ancient Egyptian Medicine

Long before books, phones, and emails the Egyptians came up with a brilliant way to track records and history. They designed their own paper called papyrus. Papyrus is made from a plant that grows by the Nile River in Egypt. It can grow up to fifteen feet high. They made papyrus into paper by removing the outside layer of the stem, then slicing the inside layer into long strips and placing them side by side with a second layer on top pointed at a right angle. Then they would soak the whole entire thing into water and was pressed under a big, heavy rock for nearly twenty-one days. After the twenty-one days of being pressed underweight, the juice from the plant acted as a glue that held all the strips together. This resulted into a sheet, which …show more content…
If anyone was to be sick in the ancient times, the supposedly the best place to be sick would be in Egypt. Why? They had the satisfaction of being treated by physicians whose art was renowned all over the ancient world. One interesting part about the ancient Egyptian medicine was that if you had injuries caused by fighting, there were dealt and or healed with by the sting of a scorpion and the horrendous bite of a snake. The exorcist of Serqet knew the right spells and remedies to cleanse the body. Sekhmet, or the other hand, was the goddess of healing, curses, and threats, often accompanied by the injection of nasty smelling and tasting medicines that were hoped to prove effective. Some other spiritual ways of healing included prayer and different kinds of magic, and amulets. One remedy that they Egyptians used of the common cold was the milk of a mother who has given birth to a baby boy. However, they had a spell to go with it to increase the change of …show more content…
The use of surgery grew from a knowledge of the basic anatomy of the Egyptians. They had different surgical tools that they used, including different needles. These needles were used to stich the wounds and make sure that they were closed after the surgery was accomplished. In Saqqara there is the tomb of Ankh-Mahor, or also known as the Tomb of the Physician. There is one specific picture in this tomb on one of the walls that shows two men having their extremities treated. This, they call a manicure, or surgery. When people have this done people occasionally survive. One other picture shows two men being circumcised. With this picture the hieroglyphs say the ointment is used to make it acceptable. This has been interpreted as the meaning that a local anesthetic was being used. They collected these genitals as trophies. Boys were then destined for priesthood and were circumcised as a part of the ritual cleansing. This also included shaving the whole entire body. This circumcision ritual became universal during the Late Period, and perhaps became a big part of a rite of passage. Ann Macy Roth analyzed this relief in 1991 and proposed a new interpretation on circumcision. She strongly believes the circumcision was not conducted for medical purposes during the initiation of the ceremony into manhood. One thing that I did find fairly interesting was that there was no form of anesthesia or any of the surgical