[Mb-civic] Ancient Surgery, (And It's At the Met...)

[Jim Burns]

And, this is fascinating....
___
 
 
"Surgical Secrets of the Ancients"
 Edward Willet's Science Column

 
We in the 21st century have a deplorable tendency at times to look down
on those who lived in centuries preceding ours as primitive, ignorant
people. 
 
No, I'm not talking about those poor benighted souls of the late,
unlamented 20th century (especially since I was one of them). I'm
thinking of a bit further back—say, ancient Egypt.
 
Fortunately, every now and then, something crops up that shows us that
our typical condescension toward the people of the past is misplaced. 
One such artifact is the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, the oldest known
historical text on surgery—and, in fact, the oldest known medical
document of any length—in the world.
 
I confess I had never heard of the Edwin Smith papyrus until I ran
across a mention of it in one of the science blogs I peruse daily: in
this case, Medgadget. It's not that it's a new discovery: it was
purchased by Connecticut-born Egyptologist Edwin Smith in Luxor, Egypt,
in 1862. He attempted to translate it, but never published anything
about it. When he died in 1906, he left the papyrus to his daughter, who
donated it to the New York Historical Society, who finally got around to
asking James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago to translate it in
1920. He completed and published his translation in 1930.
 
Since 1948 the papyrus has been held in the rare books vault at the New
York Academy of Medicine—but this past Tuesday, September 13, it went
on public display for the first time since 1948. You can see it through
January 15 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as the centrepiece of a
new exhibition called "The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt."
 
The papyrus, which consists of 377 lines of text on the front and 92
lines on the back, has been dated to around 1700 B.C., , but it's
believed to be a copy of a text originally written a few hundred years
earlier. It tells physicians how to recognize, examine, diagnose and
treat forty-eight distinct injuries. Much like a modern anatomy textbook
might, it begins at the top of the head and works its way down to the
shoulder blades and chest. (It presumably at one point continued to the
feet, but that part of the text didn't make it into the surviving copy.)
 
Its similarity to a modern medical text is, ultimately, what is so
fascinating about the Edwin Smith papyrus. It deals entirely in
practicalities, with magic mentioned in only one of the 48 case studies.
By contrast, more general medical documents from ancient Egypt, dealing
with the myriad diseases that plagued the Nile valley, are full of
incantations.  (That's not surprising, since in ancient Egypt, the
local physician, priest and magician might very well be the same
person.)
 
Most of the injuries described are the sort of thing you might suffer in
a Bronze Age battle. That's consistent with the theory that all surgery
began with the treatment of military injuries.
 
One surprising bit of modernity in the manuscript is the equivalent of
the famous medical injunction to "First, do no harm." Surgeons are
loathe to perform unnecessary surgery, because surgery itself damages
the body. In the Edwin Smith papyrus, cases are classified as favorable,
uncertain, or "an ailment not to be treated." The latter concept is not
found in any other Egyptian medical document. The author of the papyrus
includes 14 types of injury which he cannot cure; the fact he
nevertheless includes detailed descriptions of them indicates what today
we would certainly call a scientific interest in the workings of the
body.
 
Th Edwin Smith papyrus also contains the first descriptions of the
cranial sutures (those squiggly cracks in a skull where the various
plates of bone join together), the meninges (the lining of the brain),
the surface of the brain, cerebrospinal fluid, surgical stitching, and
various types of dressings. It indicates that surgeons were already
beginning to recognize that the heart pumped blood all around the
body—something not firmly established until the 17th century. It talks
about using honey (which kills bacteria) on open wounds, and giving
patients a potion based on willow bark to ease pain (willow bark
contains a compound chemically related to aspirin).
 
James H. Breasted called the document "the oldest nucleus of really
scientific knowledge in the world."
 
Perhaps putting it on display will teach us 21st-centurians to
appreciate our many-times-great-grandparents' achievements a little bit
more. 
 
  
Edward Willett is a freelance writer in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
E-mail comments or questions to ewillett at sasktel.net. Ed's website is
www.edwardwillett.com, and his blog is at edwardwillett.blogspot.com.
Ed's latest novel is the exciting science-fiction adventure Lost in
Translation (Five Star, ISBN 1594143056).