Ancient Egyptian Medicine

Summary

Ancient Egyptian medicine was practiced over roughly three millennia of continuous civilization, from the early Old Kingdom through the late Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Its practitioners — primarily the swnw, or trained physician — combined empirical observation with magical and religious practice in a framework that did not oppose these approaches but treated them as complementary. The surviving evidence consists of a small corpus of medical papyri, a large body of human remains preserved by mummification, and scattered artistic and textual references. The medical papyri reveal systematic clinical practice, sophisticated surgical description, and a coherent (if now archaic) theory of disease transmission through the body’s vessel-network. Claims about Egyptian medicine have frequently been exaggerated; the genuine achievement over three thousand years is substantial without embellishment. Writing in 1951, Henry Sigerist emphasized the ecological and social dimensions of Egyptian medicine that purely clinical analysis tends to underweight: the Nile as the source of both agricultural surplus and endemic disease, the coercive social conditions borne by the majority of Egyptians, and the three distinct healer types — physician, priest of Sekhmet, and sorcerer — that coexisted throughout the tradition rather than forming a developmental sequence from magic to rationalism (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951)(Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

Sources and Historiographical Context

Knowledge of Egyptian scripts was lost entirely from the early Christian period until Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822 (Nunn, 1996). Study of pharaonic medicine thus began in earnest only in the nineteenth century, and the discipline remains constrained by the fragmentary record: surviving medical writings are sparse compared to Greek and Roman sources, patient perspectives are almost entirely absent, and no Egyptian medical equipment predating the Roman period has been found (Nunn, 1996). The immense temporal span of Egyptian civilization compounds interpretation — the Old Kingdom was as many centuries before Hippocrates as we are after him (Nunn, 1996).

Nunn, the standard modern authority, warns that improbable claims based on over-imaginative interpretation of the papyri have greatly confused the historical picture (Nunn, 1996). He argues that the genuine Egyptian medical accomplishments accumulated over three millennia require no exaggeration to be impressive (Nunn, 1996). Ebbell’s 1937 English translation of the Ebers papyrus, for example, freely identified conditions including angina, asthma, diabetes, and hemiplegia without philological basis, and these identifications have been widely cited despite their linguistic unsoundness (Nunn, 1996). The standard scholarly reference remains the nine-volume Grundriss der Medizin der alten Agypter, produced in Berlin between 1954 and 1973, without which serious study of the field is effectively impossible (Nunn, 1996).

Sigerist’s treatment in A History of Medicine volume one (1951) approaches the same material from a social-historical rather than clinical-philological angle. Where Nunn’s primary questions are what conditions the Egyptians recognized and what treatments they actually used, Sigerist asks what kind of society produced this medicine and what social role it played. His analysis situates Egyptian geography, agricultural labor, and occupational disease at the foundation of any account of pharaonic health (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The 1922 publication of James Henry Breasted’s translation of the Edwin Smith Papyrus was, for Sigerist, the turning point that first revealed the rational dimension of Egyptian medicine to modern scholarship — demonstrating that systematic clinical observation had existed alongside magic throughout the tradition (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

Three sources of evidence provide largely non-overlapping information: human remains, artistic representations, and the medical papyri themselves (Nunn, 1996). Each has limitations: remains can be identified palaeopathologically but rarely linked to papyrus-described conditions; artistic representations may follow iconographic conventions rather than depict actual pathology; and papyrus terminology is often untranslatable with confidence (Nunn, 1996).

The Medical Papyri

Clement of Alexandria, writing in the second century AD, recorded that the ancient Egyptians possessed forty-two books of human knowledge, of which six were medical: the structure of the body, diseases, surgical instruments, remedies, eye diseases, and diseases of women (Nunn, 1996). Of this canon only fragments survive. The existing medical papyri date mostly from the Middle and New Kingdom periods, though some may preserve material from the Old Kingdom.

The Edwin Smith papyrus — purchased in 1862 by an American in Luxor, with its surviving copy dated to approximately 1550 BC — is the most important surgical text from ancient Egypt and arguably the most remarkable medical document from the ancient world (Nunn, 1996). Parts of it are thought to have been first composed during the Old Kingdom, and notably, the earliest known Egyptian medical writings contain less magic than later periods, suggesting that the rational clinical tradition was not a late development but a persistent strand from the beginning (Nunn, 1996). It presents forty-eight cases in a systematic format with four components: title, examination, diagnostic pronouncement, and treatment (Nunn, 1996). Diagnoses are classified into three triage categories — “an ailment which I will treat,” “an ailment with which I will contend,” and “an ailment not to be treated” — a framework recognizable as proto-triage and the earliest known example of systematic prognosis-based clinical classification (Nunn, 1996). The papyrus contains remarkably little magic — only a single incantation in Case 9 — and its cases proceed systematically from injuries to the head downward through the body (Nunn, 1996).

The Ebers papyrus, the longest medical papyrus at 110 pages and dated to the ninth year of Amenhotep I (c. 1534 BC), covers internal medicine, surgical conditions, eye disease, gynaecology, and skin disorders, and claims mythological antiquity — asserting it was found under the feet of Anubis in Letopolis in the time of King Den of the First Dynasty (Nunn, 1996). Unlike the Edwin Smith papyrus, it contains frequent incantations and magical passages embedded within pharmaceutical prescriptions. Sigerist’s textual analysis distinguishes nine distinct groups of texts within the Ebers, confirming that it is a compendium assembled from multiple earlier sources rather than a unified composition (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The Edwin Smith papyrus contains sixty-nine glosses — parenthetical explanations of archaic or technical terms inserted into the text — which indicate that the surviving copy derives from an older original and that some of its vocabulary had fallen out of common use by the time of copying (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The Kahun gynaecological papyrus, dated to approximately 1825 BC, is the oldest surviving medical papyrus and contains 34 paragraphs on gynaecological conditions including pregnancy testing and contraception by pessary (Nunn, 1996). Additional papyri supplement the main corpus: the Papyrus Hearst, the Berlin Papyrus (which includes a pregnancy test), and the Chester Beatty Papyri (dealing primarily with diseases of the anus and rectum and headache) each reflect distinct compiling traditions and extend coverage of the pharmaceutical and clinical record (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The Brooklyn papyrus on snake bites, which names thirty-eight species, provides the most direct evidence for the parallel clinical roles of physician and healing priest, as it contains conventional pharmaceutical remedies in approximately the same format as the medical papyri (Nunn, 1996).

The Clinical and Anatomical Framework

The Vessel Theory

The anatomical core of Egyptian medicine was a system of metu — a word with no direct English equivalent that covers blood vessels, various ducts, tendons, and muscles, and may include nerves (Nunn, 1996). The Ebers papyrus vessel book describes twenty-two metu leading from the heart to various parts of the body and converging at the anus, creating a conceptual network for the spread of noxious substances from the bowels throughout the body (Nunn, 1996). This theory of disease — in which a morbid substance called wekhedu arose in the gastrointestinal tract and spread through the metu to cause pathology elsewhere — was coherent as a unified disease theory, even though anatomically incorrect (Nunn, 1996). Its practical implication was a heavy emphasis on purgation: Herodotus described Egyptian health practices favorably, noting that they purged themselves monthly with emetics and enemas and held that all diseases arise from food, an account consistent with the wekhedu theory and corroborated by multiple ancient observers (Nunn, 1996)(Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). Roughly one quarter of all prescriptions in the Ebers papyrus were directed at the gastrointestinal system (Nunn, 1996). Sigerist, writing from the perspective of the full history of medicine, notes that this vessel-and-obstruction framework — forty-six metu running from the heart to every part of the body, with disease resulting when they became blocked — constitutes the earliest known systematic theory of internal circulatory physiology, anticipating in a rudimentary way the later Greek theories of pneuma and humoral circulation (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

Neuroanatomy and Surgery

The Edwin Smith papyrus contains the earliest known description of the brain, in Case 6, which compares the surface corrugations of the injured brain to slag forming on molten copper in a crucible (Nunn, 1996). The papyrus also describes the cardinal sign of fractured skull base (blood from both nostrils and both ears) and clinical signs of meningeal injury, the earliest known documentation of these findings (Nunn, 1996). Case 31 describes quadriplegia, priapism, and urinary incontinence resulting from cervical spinal injury — an apt clinical description of a high spinal cord lesion (Nunn, 1996). The papyrus also contains the earliest detailed description of an infected wound, specifying all cardinal signs of inflammation — swelling, redness, heat, and failure of the wound to close — except pain (Nunn, 1996).

Despite these observations, the Egyptians did not associate the brain with thought or bodily control; at embalming the brain was the only major organ discarded rather than preserved, which Nunn takes as unequivocal evidence of their failure to recognize its function (Nunn, 1996). The Edwin Smith papyrus’s vocabulary for fracture types is notable: six distinct terms distinguish simple fracture (heseb), comminuted or depressed fracture (sed), split injury (peshen), impacted fracture (sehem), perforation of flat bone (tehem), and dislocation (wenekh) (Nunn, 1996).

Human dissection was not practiced under the Egyptian pharaohs, most probably due to the religious reverence for the dead: there is no evidence it was undertaken until Herophilus worked at the Alexandrian medical school in the early Ptolemaic period (Nunn, 1996). Egyptian hieroglyphic sign-lists confirm this indirectly — all sixty-three body-part signs depict external features only, suggesting no systematic knowledge of internal anatomy was formalized when the script stabilized in the Old Kingdom (Nunn, 1996).

Magic and Religion in Egyptian Medicine

In pharaonic Egypt there was little distinction between magic and religion, and both were regarded as major determinants of disease causation (Nunn, 1996). The distribution of magic within the medical papyri, however, follows a recognizable logic: incantations are rare in trauma cases, where the cause was obvious and the outcome more predictable, and very common in internal medical conditions, where aetiology was unknown (Nunn, 1996). The Ebers papyrus makes the intended synergy explicit: “Strong is magic in combination with a medicine and vice versa” (Nunn, 1996).

Sigerist explicitly rejects what he calls the standard progressive-rationalization thesis — the view that Egyptian medicine began as pure magic, that magic was gradually superseded by religion, and that rational science eventually displaced religion. His analysis of the papyri leads him to the opposite conclusion: magic, religion, and empirical medicine coexisted at every stage of Egyptian civilization, and many single prescriptions contain both an incantation and a drug formulation for the same complaint (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). This coexistence was not confusion but a coherent cosmological framework: each part of the human body was identified with a specific deity, so that disease of any organ was simultaneously an assault on the corresponding divine being — making the physician’s intervention an act of cosmic as well as physical restoration (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). Incantations operated through four rhetorical modes: commanding the demon to depart, threatening it with divine retribution, cajoling it, or identifying the patient with a deity so that the attacking demon was confronted by a divine rather than a mortal opponent; this last mode was considered the most powerful (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

Sigerist also offers an account of pharmacy’s origins within this framework. The incantation was originally the entire treatment; the material substance used was secondary, serving as the vehicle for the magical word. Over time the substance acquired an independent therapeutic reputation based on observed effects, until the drug came to be regarded as the active agent and the incantation was reduced to an accompanying formula (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The hybrid form — “recite this spell four times over the drug and give it to the patient to drink” — persisted throughout Egyptian medicine without ever being resolved in favor of purely empirical practice (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). Amulets operated on the same logic as incantations but in durable material form: an inscribed object carrying a protective formula or divine image provided continuous magical protection rather than the momentary protection of a spoken spell (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The psychotherapeutic dimensions of this whole system should not be underestimated: the authority of the healer, the patient’s identification with a divine figure, and the ritual context of treatment all mobilized genuine psychological forces that could affect clinical outcomes (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

The Osiris-Isis-Horus myth cycle was fundamental to healing magic: Isis’s magical skills in reassembling the dismembered Osiris and curing the child Horus made her the ideal deity to invoke for protection and cure, with the patient identified with Horus-the-child (Nunn, 1996). Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess, was simultaneously a cause of pestilence and a source of healing; her wab priests were considered parallel to the swnw in medical practice (Nunn, 1996). Sigerist identifies a coherent healing pantheon structured around complementary roles: Thoth as the god of wisdom, writing, and medicine; Isis as the great healer-magician; Horus as the archetypal patient of his mother’s healing art; Sekhmet as the deity who both sent and removed plague; and, in later periods, the deified Imhotep (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The only archaeologically attested Egyptian sanatorium — at the temple of Hathor at Dendera — featured cells for incubation (temple sleep) and basins in which water was poured over healing statues inscribed with magical texts and then administered to patients (Nunn, 1996).

Nunn argues that much apparently irrational magical practice carried unrecognized functional components: the placebo effect provided genuine therapeutic benefit in relieving pain and generating expectation of cure (Nunn, 1996), and some magical prescriptions about when to gather medicinal herbs may have inadvertently tracked diurnal variation in plant alkaloid concentrations (Nunn, 1996).

The Practitioners

The Swnw and Medical Pluralism

The physician (swnw, conventionally pronounced “sewnew”) was the primary practitioner of medical knowledge, but not the only one: the Ebers papyrus explicitly states that doctors, wab priests of Sekhmet, and magicians (sau) all practised medicine on equivalent footing, all placing their hands on patients to examine what Nunn identifies as the pulse (Nunn, 1996). Medical practice in ancient Egypt was pluralistic by design, not by default. Sigerist articulates the structural logic of this pluralism more explicitly than Nunn: these three healer types were not stages in a progression from superstition to science but contemporaneous social roles with distinct texts, techniques, and institutional locations throughout Egyptian history. The swnw employed empirical drugs and physical treatments; the priest of Sekhmet held specialized knowledge of the goddess of pestilence and managed diseases sent by her; the sau treated disease by purely magical means (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

Hesy-ra (c. 2650 BC, Third Dynasty) is the first recorded doctor in history, holding the title “chief of dentists and doctors” under King Djoser; his court contemporary Imhotep, though not documented as a physician in his own lifetime, was subsequently revered as a healing deity (Nunn, 1996)(Nunn, 1996). Medical specialization was already well advanced during the Old Kingdom — almost half of all known pharaonic physicians practiced in this period (Nunn, 1996) — and by the fifth century BC Herodotus observed nine known ophthalmologists, three gastroenterologists, and the unique title “herdsman of the anus” for a proctologist (Nunn, 1996). The lady Peseshet, of the Fifth to Sixth Dynasty, held the title “overseer of the female physicians,” making her the first recorded female doctor in history (Nunn, 1996).

Diodorus Siculus reported that military physicians were publicly funded and required to follow written laws composed by ancient physicians, with death as the penalty for deviating from prescribed treatments — though how accurately this reflects actual Old or Middle Kingdom practice is uncertain (Nunn, 1996). Medical knowledge was transmitted partly within families: the Ebers papyrus restricts certain secret remedies to those “under the doctor, except for your own daughter,” and the stela of Iuny attests the first known father-son physician lineage (Nunn, 1996).

Imhotep

Imhotep — royal chamberlain and architect of the step pyramid under Djoser — was deified as “son of Ptah” by the Twenty-seventh Dynasty and identified with the Greek Asklepios (Nunn, 1996). William Osler described him as “the first figure of a physician to stand out clearly from the mists of antiquity.” However, Nunn notes that Imhotep’s tomb has never been found and there is no evidence he held the title of swnw; most Egyptologists conclude that he cannot be considered a doctor on available evidence (Nunn, 1996). Whatever his actual medical role, his later deification made him the focal point of a healing cult lasting well into the Graeco-Roman period.

Clinical Method

The Egyptian healer’s clinical approach followed a three-phase structure: listening to symptoms and physical examination, formal diagnostic pronouncement, and treatment based on accumulated experience — a structure Nunn describes as recognizably ancestral to modern clinical practice (Nunn, 1996). The Edwin Smith papyrus is nearly unique among Egyptian medical texts in providing detailed clinical descriptions before proceeding to treatment; most other medical papyri assume the diagnosis is known and simply prescribe remedies (Nunn, 1996). Sigerist singles out the Edwin Smith Papyrus as the clearest ancient evidence of medicine grounded in sensory observation of the patient’s body: the physician looks at the wound, palpates it, smells it, observes the patient’s posture and gait, and examines the pulse — all direct physical investigation rather than divination.(Sigerist, Henry E., 1951)

Pharmacology

The Egyptian pharmacopoeia was predominantly empirical rather than rational, aimed at symptom relief rather than eradication of disease causes (Nunn, 1996). Sigerist characterized Egyptian pharmaceutical practice as technically sophisticated across its full range: prescriptions were measured by a standardized unit system, the vehicle (beer, wine, water, milk, honey, or oil) was carefully specified, routes of administration were formally defined, and compound prescriptions could contain up to thirty-five ingredients — a formal structure prefiguring later Greek and Roman pharmacy.(Sigerist, Henry E., 1951) Drugs were dispensed by volume rather than weight, with the smallest unit being the ro (approximately 14 ml) and prescriptions expressed as fractional proportions without specified total doses (Nunn, 1996). Routes of administration included oral, rectal (enema or suppository), vaginal, external application, and fumigation (Nunn, 1996). Only about 20% of the approximately 160 plant products mentioned in the medical texts can be identified with certainty, severely limiting assessment of the pharmacopoeia’s effectiveness (Nunn, 1996). Pharmacologists studying ethnobotany have acknowledged, however, that traditional plant lore from the ancient world provided healers with genuine analgesics, emetics, purgatives, diuretics, and narcotics (Porter, 1997).

Several Egyptian remedies are now known to have had genuine pharmacological activity. Powdered malachite (the green eye-paint wadju) inhibited growth of Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa due to traces of copper passing into solution (Nunn, 1996). Honey, used extensively on wounds, has demonstrated antibacterial and antifungal properties arising from its high osmotic concentration (Nunn, 1996). Beer, administered as a vehicle for many remedies, unintentionally delivered tetracycline produced by airborne streptomycete contamination during brewing — an antibiotic active against a range of pathogenic bacteria, detected in bone from Roman-period Egypt (Nunn, 1996). Pomegranate root and wormwood, used against intestinal worms, are genuine vermifuges (Nunn, 1996).

Ecology, Society, and the Disease Burden

Sigerist was the first historian of medicine to insist systematically that Egyptian civilization’s ecological foundations shaped its disease burden. Egypt functioned as a geographically bounded civilization: desert to the east and west, sea to the north, and Nile cataracts to the south produced a relatively self-contained cultural and epidemiological environment that allowed a coherent, continuous medical tradition to develop over three millennia (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The Nile’s annual inundation deposited the fertile silt that made agriculture possible in an otherwise desert region, but the same hydraulic system that fed the population also maintained the conditions for endemic parasitic disease (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). Ancient basin-irrigation drained the fields seasonally, but modern perennial irrigation — Sigerist notes by comparison — keeps water standing year-round, explaining why malaria is more prevalent in Egypt today than it was in antiquity; ancient Egyptians were, in this respect at least, healthier than their modern counterparts (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The Nile’s gift was inseparable from its hazard: schistosomiasis (bilharzia), caused by the Schistosoma worm that breeds in slow-moving fresh water, was endemic throughout pharaonic history as a direct consequence of agricultural dependence on the river (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

The social conditions under which most Egyptians lived imposed additional disease burdens that the medical papyri, composed for and by the educated elite, largely fail to document. The peasant farmer was in practice a serf — taxed in grain, subject to corvée labor on irrigation canals and public monuments, and beaten if unable to pay — a coercive system whose health consequences Sigerist regards as foundational to any complete account of Egyptian medicine (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). A Middle Kingdom literary text known as the Instruction of Dwauf (or Satire on the Trades) offers an unusual oblique window onto occupational health: a father enumerating the miseries of various crafts to persuade his son to become a scribe inadvertently catalogs the weaver’s hunched posture, the potter’s dust inhalation, and the barber’s relentless exposure to outdoor conditions (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). More direct evidence comes from an attendance register preserved from the royal necropolis workmen at Deir el-Medina, which records day-by-day causes of absence; analysis shows that illness accounted for more lost working days than any other single cause, including religious holidays, providing documentary evidence of the health burden on Egyptian manual workers (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). At the extreme end, Diodorus Siculus’s account of the gold mines of the Eastern Desert describes condemned criminals, prisoners of war, and their families worked to exhaustion and death under armed guard, without rest or prospect of release (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). Even in this coercive system, collective action was possible: workmen at Deir el-Medina staged documented work stoppages during the reign of Ramesses III to protest non-payment of grain rations — among the earliest recorded labor actions in history (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

Disease in Pharaonic Egypt

Palaeopathological study of mummified remains has identified a wide range of conditions in ancient Egypt. Marc Armand Ruffer’s 1910 discovery of calcified Schistosoma ova in the kidneys of Twentieth Dynasty mummies established the antiquity of schistosomiasis, which immunological testing has since confirmed from the Predynastic period onward (Nunn, 1996). Plasmodium falciparum antigen has been detected in mummies from all periods investigated, suggesting endemic malaria throughout pharaonic times (Nunn, 1996). Ruffer also identified spinal tuberculosis (Pott’s disease) in a Twenty-first Dynasty priest of Amun (Nunn, 1996). Mummy tissue from ancient Egypt has also revealed highly developed arteriosclerosis, pneumonia, kidney stones, gallstones, and appendicitis (Ackerknecht, 1955). There is no convincing evidence of syphilis in ancient Egyptian remains (Nunn, 1996).

Transmission and Legacy

Egyptian medical conservatism ensured that productive developments were retained and accumulated over time; the early invention of writing and the durability of papyrus provided the means for codifying and propagating medical practice across many centuries (Nunn, 1996). Egyptian physicians enjoyed a strong international reputation in antiquity: Homer’s Odyssey described Egypt as a land where “every man is a physician,” Ramses II dispatched a physician to the Hittite court, and Cyrus of Persia sought the best Egyptian ophthalmologist (Nunn, 1996). Sigerist adds institutional detail to this picture of international prestige: Darius I of Persia, on finding the medical school at Sais in a state of neglect after the Persian conquest of Egypt, ordered it restored and personally funded the re-establishment of Egyptian medical education — testimony that even under foreign rule Egypt was regarded as the primary source of medical training in the ancient world (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). Egyptian medicine retained its international reputation for over a thousand years after its period of original production had ended, even as the tradition had ceased to be creatively productive (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

The transition of medical authority from Egypt to Greece is marked most sharply, in Sigerist’s telling, by the story of Democedes of Croton at the court of Darius: Egyptian physicians failed to treat the king’s injured foot, and the Greek physician Democedes succeeded. Whatever the legendary elements of this account, it reflects a historical reality — by the late sixth century BC Greek medicine was beginning to rival and eventually supersede Egyptian medicine in international prestige (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). Sigerist is methodologically cautious about asserting direct Egyptian influence on Greek medicine: the same technique appearing in both traditions could represent independent discovery, common borrowing from a third source, or actual transmission, and only a very small number of cases meet the evidentiary standard for asserting proven transmission (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The birth prognosis texts — which predict infant survival from the characteristics of the newborn’s first cry — constitute one of the clearest documented cases: virtually the same text appears in both Egyptian papyri and the Hippocratic corpus, passing from there into Roman and then medieval European medical literature in a traceable chain (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

By the Persian and Ptolemaic periods, however, Greek medicine was increasingly competitive, and the Alexandrian medical school — where Herophilus became the first practitioner to perform systematic human dissection — operated under Ptolemaic patronage in a way that would progressively marginalize the older pharaonic medical tradition. In the Hellenistic period, Egyptian materia medica was enriched by trade access to new drug sources from Asia, Persia, and sub-Saharan Africa, but this enrichment was purely additive: it did not stimulate any development in pathological or physiological theory, and the three-healer structure, the metu vessel framework, and the coexistence of magic with empirical practice all remained essentially unchanged (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). The tradition’s final form survives in Coptic medical manuscripts from Meshaikh (ninth and tenth centuries CE), containing 237 recipes with a predominance of eye conditions — the last stage of the indigenous Egyptian medical tradition, now written in Coptic (the final form of the Egyptian language) but preserving material traceable to pharaonic antecedents (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

See Also

• Edwin Smith Papyrus
• Ebers Papyrus
• Imhotep
• Hesy-Ra
• Kahun Papyrus
• Wekhedu
• Metu
• Hippocratic Medicine
• Alexandrian Medicine
• Mummification
• Palaeopathology
• Medical Pluralism

Sources

• Nunn, J. F. (1996). Ancient Egyptian Medicine. London: British Museum Press. [nunn-ancient-egyptian-medicine-1996] — Lead authority
• Sigerist, H. E. (1951). A History of Medicine, Vol. 1: Primitive and Archaic Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press. [sigerist-historyofmedicine-vol1-1951] — Social-historical perspective; chs. 11-15 on Egypt
• Ackerknecht, E. H. (1955). A Short History of Medicine. New York: Ronald Press. [ackerknecht-shorthistory-1955]
• Porter, R. (1997). The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: Norton. [porter-greatestbenefit-1997]