The role of physicians socially and even politically will then help me transition into the role of physicians in a religious context.īecause death was so central to the Egyptians, medical research was inhibited by respect for a person’s postmortem body. The archaeological record should be helpful in that regard by looking at trends in lifespan over the course of the Egyptian State. Another aspect to consider is what the education system was with regard to the process of becoming a doctor. On the other side of the coin though, I want to know if regular people had access to Health Care. This sheds some light on where medical professionals may have fallen on the social ladder. He served Djoser, demonstrating that health was important to Pharoahs as early as the Old Kingdom. In my preliminary research I found that the first recorded King’s Physician was named Hesyre. Ideally, I would be able to look at each of these categories individually and break them down into subcategories by time period (probably Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms) I’m sure I’ll have to do my best not to get hung up on the biology side, but I’m interested to see what there is with regard to archaeological evidence. I will break this question down into other categories such as: how doctors fit into the socioeconomic spectrum, how medicine intertwined with religion (and even magic), and treatments they developed for both chronic illnesses and injuries/infection. The verso side consists of eight magic spells and five prescriptions.In my research paper, I would like to answer the broad question, “what were medical practices like in Ancient Egypt?” As a STEM major, I think it would be cool to be working at an intersection between the archaeology of Ancient Egypt and my own life. Each issue details the type of injury, examination of the patient, diagnosis, and prognosis, and treatment. On the recto side, there are 48 cases of injury. The vast majority of the papyrus is concerned with trauma and surgery, with short sections on gynecology and cosmetics on the verso. It is written right-to-left in hieratic, the Egyptian cursive form of hieroglyphs, in black ink with explanatory glosses in red ink. Aside from the fragmentary outer column of the scroll, the remainder of the papyrus is intact, although it was cut into one-column pages sometime in the 20th century. The recto (front side) has 377 lines in 17 columns, while the verso (backside) has 92 lines in five columns. The Edwin Smith papyrus is a scroll 4.68 meters or 15.3 feet long. Magic would be more prevalent had the cases of illness been mysterious, such as internal disease. While other papyri, such as the Ebers Papyrus and London Medical Papyrus, are medical texts based on magic, the Edwin Smith Papyrus presents a rational and scientific approach to medicine in ancient Egypt, in which medicine and magic do not conflict. The Edwin Smith papyrus is unique among the four principal medical papyri that survive today. It dates to Dynasties 16–17 of the Second Intermediate Period in ancient Egypt, c. This document, which may have been a manual of military surgery, describes 48 cases of injuries, fractures, wounds, dislocations, and tumors. The Edwin Smith Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical text, named after the dealer who bought it in 1862, and the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma. Depending on this, treatment options are givenĪn ancient Egyptian text from approximately 1500 bce, described the “spillage of clear fluid from the interior of the brain“. Physician will fight with,” or nothing can be done for the patient. Some of the clinical symptoms and specific medical terms.Ī verdict follows that comprises three treatment possibilities: either the disease can be treated, or it is a disease “the When deemed necessary, differential diagnostics are mentioned as well as an additional explanation of After the title, the diagnostic procedure and relevant clinical signsĪre enumerated. Again,Įach case is presented in a clearly structured manner. It describes injuries and wounds from head to toe (a capite ad calcem), separated into 48 cases. Holds a very special position in the canon of the ten surviving major medical papyri from ancient Egypt.
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