Ancient Egyptian Medicine

Ancient Egyptian Medicine

The Ancient Egyptians have provided modern historians with a great deal of knowledge and evidence about their attitude towards  medicine and the medical knowledge that they had. This evidence has come from the numerous papyruses found in archaeological searches.

Like prehistoric man, some of the beliefs of the Egyptians were based on myths and legend. However, their knowledge was also based on an increasing knowledge of the human anatomy and plain commonsense.

In Ancient Egypt, the treatment of illnesses was no longer carried out only by magicians and medicine men. We have evidence that people existed who were referred to physicians and doctors.

Physicians lived even earlier in Ancient Egypt. Imphotep was the physician to King Zozer and lived in about 2600 BC. Imphotep was considered so important that he was, after his death, was worshipped as a god of healing.

Almost all of our knowledge about Ancient Egyptian medical knowledge comes from the discoveries of papyrus documents. The very dry atmosphere in Egypt has meant that many of these documents have been very well preserved despite their age. Numerous papyrus documents have come from the era 1900 BC to 1500 BC. It is from these documents that we know that the Ancient Egyptians still believed that the supernatural caused some disease.

When there was no obvious reason for an illness, many Ancient Egypt doctors and priests believed that disease was caused by spiritual beings. When no-one could explain why someone had a disease, spells and magical potions were used to drive out the spirits.

Despite this use of remedies that come from a lack of knowledge, the Ancient Egyptians also developed their knowledge as a result of education. Ancient papyrus inform us that the Ancient Egyptians were discovering things about how the human body worked and they knew that the heart, pulse rates, blood and air were important to the workings of the human body. A heart that beat feebly told doctors that the patient had problems. 

Medicine and Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece played an important part in medical history. The most famous of all Ancient Greek doctors was Hippocrates. By 1200 B.C., Ancient Greece was developing in all areas - trade, farming, warfare, sailing, craftsmanship etc. Their knowledge of medicine developed accordingly.

Hippocrates made such an impression on medical history that his name is still very much associated with medicine today. All newly qualified doctors take what is called the ‘Hippocratic Oath’ and some see Hippocrates as the father of modern medicine even though he did most of his work some 430 years before the birth of Christ.

Greek doctors had started to look at the issue of poor health and disease by using a process of reasoning and observation. The most famous of these was Hippocrates. He is thought to have been born in Cos in 460 BC. In fact, we know very little about Hippocrates as a person but his fame was such that Plato and Aristotle wrote about him. While Hippocrates has found fame in medical history, there were other Ancient Greek doctors who were not so lucky.

Ancient Greek medical knowledge is demonstrated in what is known as the Hippocratic Collection. This is a collection of sixty medical books of which Hippocrates wrote just some. We do not know who wrote most of them but they cover a time span of 150 years so they could not have all been written by Hippocrates.

Hippocrates and other Greek doctors believed that the work done by a doctor should be kept separate from the work done by a priest.

Gods dominated the lives of the Greeks. Natural occurrences were explained away by using gods. This, however, did not occur in medicine where Ancient Greek physicians tried to find a natural explanation as to why someone got ill and died.

The Greeks were practicing medicine 1000 years before the birth of Christ. In the ‘Iliad’  by Homer, injured soldiers were treated by doctors and the Greek leader in the tale, Menelaus, was treated for an arrow wound by a doctor-in-arms, Machaon.

During the period 600 B.C. to 400 B.C., the Ancient Greeks also made great advances in philosophy. 

Medicine in Ancient Rome

The Ancient Romans made a huge input into  medicine and health, though their input was mainly concerned with public health schemes. Though the Roman ‘discoveries’ may not have been in the field of pure medicine, poor hygiene by people was a constant source of disease, so any improvement in public health was to have a major impact on society.

Claudius Galen was a Greek physician who went to Rome and revived the ideas of Hippocrates and other Greek doctors. The Romans had shown little interest in the work of Hippocrates and it took Galen to push it forward in Rome.

The Romans learned a great deal from the Ancient Greeks. They first came into contact with the Greeks in about 500 BC By 146 B.C. part of Greece had become a province of the Roman Empire and by 27 B.C., the Romans were in control not only of Greece but of Greek-speaking lands around the Mediterranean. They used the ideas of the Greeks but they did not simply copy them. Greek ideas they found impractical they ignored and it seems that the Romans were more keen on things that would lead to the direct improvement of the quality of life of the people in their huge empire.

The Romans were great believers in a healthy mind equalling a healthy body. There was a belief that if you kept fit, you would be more able to combat an illness. Rather than spend money on a doctor, many Romans spent money on keeping fit.A person should put aside some part of the day for the care of his body. He should always make sure that he gets enough exercise especially before a meal. 

The Romans did believe that illnesses had a natural cause and that bad health could be caused by bad water and sewage. Hence their desire to improve the public health system in the Roman Empire so that everyone in their empire benefited. – not just the rich. Those who worked for the Romans needed good health as did their soldiers. In this sense, the Romans were the first civilisation to introduce a programme of public health for everyone regardless of wealth. 
 
 
 

Medicine in the Middle Ages

Medical knowledge in the Middle Ages must have appeared to have stood still. While the Ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians had pushed forward medical knowledge, after the demise of these civilisations, the momentum started by these people tended to stagnate and it did not develop at the same pace until the Seventeenth/Eighteenth Centuries. In Britain, as an example, most things linked to the Romans was destroyed – villas were covered up as the Ancient Britons believed that they contained ghosts and evil spirits. With this approach, it is not surprising that anything medical linked to the Romans fell into disuse in Britain.

By the 14th Century, universities had developed in Western Europe that could be classed as medical schools where students could study under a master physician. The University of Montpelier was one such university. Dissections of human bodies were carried out in these universities so anyone wanting to study medicine in the Middle Ages was not totally ignorant of facts about the human body. Public debates were also encouraged about medical issues and it is known that some medical schools encouraged students to actually challenge the ideas of Galen and Hippocrates. As a result of this refusal to take what Galen and Hippocrates had stated at face value some progress was made in the medical world during this time.

However, medicine became steeped in superstition and the Roman Catholic Church effectively dominated what direction the medical world took. Any views different from the established Roman Catholic Church view could veer towards heresy with the punishments that entailed. Therefore, when the Roman Catholic Church stated that illnesses were punishments from God and that those who were ill were so because they were sinners, few argued otherwise.

Medical practitioners were also still heavily influenced by Galen 1000 years after his death. Mondino’s book on the anatomy, "Anathomia", still relied on observations made by Galen and other Greek writers of medicine.

Some Greek and Muslim physicians believed that the moon and planets played an important part in good health and this belief was continued in the Middle Ages. They believed that the human body and the planets were made up of the same four elements (earth, fire, air and water). For the body to operate well, all four elements had to be in harmony with no imbalances. It was believed that the Moon had the greatest influence on fluids on Earth and that it was the Moon that had the ability to affect positively or negatively the four elements in your body. Where the Moon and planets were – and a knowledge of this - was considered important when making a diagnosis and deciding on a course of treatment. Physicians needed to know when to treat a patient and when not to and where the planets were determined this. A so-called Zodiac Chart also determined when blood letting should be done as it was believed by some that the Moon and planets determined this as well.

Smallpox and London

In a crowded city like London a disease like smallpox was bound to spread. With little medical treatment available to the poor, it was this social group that suffered the most. Edward Jenner had not patented his discovery of a vaccination, but medical help had still to be paid for. This severely restricted the number of those who could be treated for smallpox and it hit hard those in dirty tenements found in London’s East End. Total deaths from smallpox for 1844: 10,316

This represents an average of 28 deaths a day from a disease that had a cure. 
 

Alexander Fleming and Penicillin

Alexander Fleming is alongside the likes of  Edward Jenner,  Robert Koch, Christian Barnard and  Louis Pasteur in medical history. Alexander Fleming discovered what was to be one of the most powerful of all antibiotics – penicillin. This drug was to change the way disease was treated and cement Fleming’s name in medical history.

One of the most important medical advances in history began by accident. On the morning of September 3rd, 1928, Professor Alexander Fleming was having a clear up of his cluttered laboratory. He was sorting through a number of glass plates that had previously been coated with staphyloccus bacteria as part of research Fleming was doing.

One of the plates had mould on it. The mould was in the shape of a ring and the area around the ring seemed to be free of the bacteria staphyloccus. The mould was penicillium notatum. Fleming had a life long interest in ways of killing off bacteria and he concluded that the bacteria on the plate around the ring had been killed off by some substance that had come from the mould.

Further research on the mould found that it could kill other bacteria and that it could be given to small animals without any side effects. However, within a year, Fleming had moved onto other medical issues and it was ten years later that  Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, working at Oxford University, isolated the bacteria-killing substance found in the mould – penicillin.

History of Medicine 1919 to 1939

The years 1919 to 1939 saw many important advances in the history of medicine. World War One had acted as a stimulus for medical progress which had continued post-war. The same was true for the era after World War Two.Many advances had been made up to 1919 but knowledge on how germs caused infections and disease, did not mean that society had cures available. At the end of World War One, 20 million people in Europe died of flu – scientists knew what caused flu but had no cure for it. Better public health schemes existed in Britain but many of the poor in society were badly affected by diseases associated with lack of basic hygiene.Between 1919 and 1939, the expanding use of technology and improved scientific techniques improved medical care. X-ray machines improved during these 20 years and in 1931 powerful electron microscopes were invented which meant that the body could be explored in much greater detail. The advent of insulin to combat diabetes was also a vital medical advance.

Medical changes from 1945

Since 1945, there have been massive strides in the treatment of cancer. The use of a combination of drugs, radiotherapy and surgery have greatly increased a cancer patient’s chances of survival. During the 1950’s, research linked smoking to lung cancer and other external factors have also been identified – such as excess sunlight potentially causing skin cancer. It is now thought that 15% of all cancers are caused by viruses.The major disease that has tested the medical world since the 1980’s has been HIV/AIDS. In the 1980’s, government’s touted HIV as near enough a death sentence and in Britain issued public health warnings on television showing icebergs crashing into the sea. Now, just twenty years on, combination drug therapy offers sufferers hope and a huge amount of research has gone into finding a cure or vaccination for this world-wide disease. ‘New’ diseases have also come to the fore including the Ebola virus.There is a vast difference in the medical world of 1945 to that of 2002. Developments within medicine would have been expected but they have been in leaps in the last decades. Diseases that would have almost certainly killed in 1945 to 1950 are now usually treatable and in many instances curable. 

By defintion, medicine is the science of diagnosing, treating, or preventing disease and damage to the body or mind. A medical invention would be any instrument, machine, implant, or similar article that is useful in the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of disease, for example: the thermometer, artificial heart, or a home pregnancy test.