Ancient Egyptian Medicinal Practices Part 4: Doctors in Ancient Egypt
Doctors in Ancient Egypt
The practice of medicine was highly regulated in ancient Egypt. Should a medical professional mistreat a patient, the penalties were severe (Brier: 2001, 59). There is testimony from Diodorus as to what a physician would face had a patient been mistreated: “…but if they go contrary to the law’s prescriptions in any respect, they must submit to a trial with death as the penalty” (Halioua: 2005, 26). The easiest way to regulate the practice of medicine was for the doctors to be trained through one of the temples. Usually, the priests associated with healing were the priests of Sekhmet, the lioness-headed goddess usually associated with warfare (Brier: 2001, 55). Other gods associated with healing were Thoth, the ibis headed or baboon god of writing, Isis, the mother goddess and goddess of magic, and Horus, the falcon-headed god of war. In this way, the medical profession was regulated, the priest-physicians received the training needed to treat the people and three distinct aspects of the medical profession were created within ancient Egyptian culture, the wabu, priest-physicians, the swnw, lay-physicians (Brier: 2001, 59), and the sau, magicians (Nunn: 1996, 113).
Each practitioner in medicine had to follow a certain procedure before proceeding to diagnose the patient’s malady. The priest, physician or magician had to feel the patient’s limbs and chest to gain knowledge as to the condition of the patient’s heart. After that, the examiner could diagnose and treat the patient in whatever form was warranted for that malady or using whatever method in which the physician was trained (Nunn: 1996, 113). In many cases, the patient was treated either with true medical knowledge or magic. Other times it was a combination of the two separate healing forms (Brier: 2001, 55).
A physician also had a certain script to follow. There were words and phrases that were to be said at certain times during the procedure. For example, before beginning to examine a patient, according to the Ebers papyrus, the physician had to say something such as “I belong to Re who says: I it is who will protect him from his enemies. His guide is Thoth who caused the writing to speak. He makes a medical compendium, he gives useful knowledge to the knowledgeable, the physicians who are behind him in order to deliver (the patient) about whom a god desires him to keep him alive. I am he of whom a god desires to keep you alive.” (Dollinger: 2000). To diagnose the patient, according to the Edwin-Smith papyrus, the physician would say “One having an [ailment]. An ailment which I will treat” (Dollinger: 2000) and after saying these words, the physician would treat the wound, giving instructions on how the patient could treat his own maladies once the physician had left (Dollinger: 2000).
As seen previously, physicians were usually trained within the temples of certain gods and goddesses associated with medicine. There is evidence, however, of the medical profession being passed down within the family. In the Ebers papyrus there is a passage that alludes to the medical profession as a family affair. “You shall prepare for him medicines, secret to who is under the doctor, except for your own daughter” (Nunn: 1996, 130). Here is a suggestion that it was possible that children followed their parents into the profession (Nunn: 1996, 130). There are other references to the medical profession being kept within the family, most notably two stelae that reference fathers passing knowledge on to their sons (Nunn: 1996, 130-131).
The medical papyri were extremely important in antiquity as they contained all the numerous instruction any physician would need. There were numerous diseases and treatments for every malady. It would be extremely difficult for anyone to remember all the remedies for all the illnesses from which the ancient Egyptians suffered. Often these papyri would be written with a specific physician in mind. The physician might have needed a certain remedy that another physician would find completely useless, thus today we have numerous surviving papyri that are geared to specific cures while other medical papyri are geared in a completely different direction. Medical papyri were not just used by the physicians themselves. In one instance in Deir el-Medina, a medical papyrus was discovered in the house of a non-medical family. It is possible that this family used the papyrus for their own medicinal practices, thus eliminating the need for a priest, physician, or magician (Nunn: 1996, 131).
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