Healing through observationĭespite obtaining such a precious document, Edwin Smith never translated the papyrus, and after his death in 1906, his daughter donated it to the New York Historical Society. There is even a recipe to eliminate wrinkles caused by the passage of time, which was made with urea, a substance used today in the production of face creams. The text shows that Egyptian doctors knew internal organs such as the heart, liver, kidneys, and gallbladder. The papyrus also contains the first descriptions of cranial sutures, meninges, as well as cerebrospinal fluid. It also includes anatomical observations and medical examinations, finishing with the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of numerous injuries.Īll the treatments are described rationally, and only one of them resorts to magical arts.
EDWIN SMITH PAPYRUS WRITTEN IN SERIES
This document describes a series of treatments to cure 48 cases of war wounds, as well as traumatic surgery. Some even say that its author was the wise Imhotep, architect of the stepped pyramid of Saqqara, who was deified as the patron saint of medicine in the Late Period. It was composed at the beginning of the 17th Dynasty (around 1540), although apparently it is a copy of much older texts, possibly dating to the Old Kingdom (2543-2436 BC). The papyrus, 468 centimeters long by 36 centimeters wide, is written in hieratic script (a simplified version of the hieroglyph, used in religious, medical, and administrative documents) and apparently not the work of a single scribe, but of several.
The Edwin Smith Papyrus owes its name to an American adventurer and antiquities collector who bought some fragments in 1862 from the Egyptian antiquities dealer Mustafa Aga in Luxor. But among all these ancient medical treatises, there is one that stands out for its importance and antiquity: the Edwin Smith Papyrus. It describes a number of diseases and their corresponding treatments. The ancient Egyptians believed that health problems were due to human anatomy, which they considered very simple, and are reflected in the so-called “Heart Treatise”, one of the parts into which one of these medical texts is divided, the Medical Papyrus Ebers, compiled around 1500 BC during the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep I.
This document is one of the fragments that were part of an ancient Egyptian surgery book and, according to some researchers, could have been composed as early as the Old Kingdom, around 4,500 years ago. The “Edwin Smith Papyrus” is an ancient Egyptian medical treatise, written in hieratic language, possibly one of the oldest medical treatises in history.
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