Medicine And Healing In Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was a society that thrived for many years. This civilization ended up devolping techniques that would be passed down many generations and even be used today. In the book, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries, Kenneth Feder states, “Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight and with no apparent antecedents whatever” (2014, 249). This means that Egyptians were very smart in their own right. One of things they tried was medicine and healing. For the longest time they believed in healing with herbs and with the help of the Gods. Egyptians did not have a long expectancy life span. The most they really lived was around 30 years old. Many of them had diseases
Rarely did they ever do surgery on a person because they did not believe in messing with internal organs. They believed in the Goddess of healing who was Sekhmet. The goddess overlooked healing, curses, threats, and smells. Egyptians believe that if someone was sick, it was because there was a particular bad entity that had possessed them. It was the physician’s job to drive it out and destroy it if they could. The way they did this was through herbs, magic, or some sort of specific ritual. Some talismans and amulets were used to help with the ritual acts sometimes. They were believed to hold some magical purpose. In an article, Innovation and Adaptations in Ancient Egyptian Medicine, states, “For it is frequently asserted that later Egyptian medicine is actually “regressive,” with ever inscreasing reliance on magic” (Ritner 2000, 107). There were three different amulets that represented things. One was called a phylactic amulet which protected you from harmful demons or gods. Second was called a homeopoetic amulet which had some animal which helps with the speed of the healing. Third was a theophoric amulet which presented a god. Sometimes animals were sacrificed in order to help with the healing
There were three categories that physicians would place their patients in. One was those who were treatable, contestable and not treatable. Contestable patients who survived their illnesses were attempted on to doing surgical procedures. There were many tools like drills, scales, spoons, knives and hooks. In another article, The Old Egyptian Medical Papyri, it states, “This needle is mounted on a handle containing a spool of thread, so that the needle can be used repeatedly without rethreading or leaving the operator’s hands” (Singer 1952, 1201). In some cases, circumcision was done on males. Anthropologists do not know yet, if female circumcision was practiced back then. Since the Egyptians mummified their dead, they still did not have that much knowledge of the internal organs. They had some knowledge about how some of the organs themselves worked. For example, they knew that the body had a pulse and that the blood ran through the body with each pulse. Yet, mummifiers were low ranking members in the Egyptian community while physicians were highly ranked. They did not work with each other or worked in the same circle as mummifiers. Therefore, their knowledge did not mix with each other’s