Medical practices in Egypt
the reign of the Old Kingdom (3200-2270 BC) as an example
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31973/aj.v2i132.782Keywords:
medicine, sickness, remedy, medical papyrusAbstract
No one can argue that medicine is one of the first knowledge which is practised by human being without knowing and by innate since the first days of history. Human’s continuous endeavour to look for anything maintaining his health plays a role to know some useful remedies by chance and by repeating the experience once, and by observing and imitating animals in another time. When religion appears, he thinks that sickness is caused as a result of the anger of gods, and if prayers and sacrifices are made, the patient would be healed, i.e. medicine is interwoven with religion, that, one of the specialisations of the priest is to practise medicine, which is called the spiritual medicine. With the passage of time, the thinking of human is developed and his imagination becomes broader, so he says that sickness, especially those that are difficult to be healed, is attributed to evil spirits and devils that can break through the body. So, he becomes pleading wizards and witches for remedy, who also begin practising medicine by using some tricks and reading some phylacteries as well as carrying beads and incantations in order to frighten the evil spirits that cause sickness and, then, to go out of the body of the patient, i.e. practising what is called nowadays preventive medicine.
Despite this obvious mixing between medicine, religion, and spell, medicine in ancient Egypt never be developed than spell. The medical practices that appear since oldest times are not only independent and discrete from the magical practices, but, in the ancient kingdom era, it reaches a high level of progress and the Egyptian doctors become famous outside Egypt, and the Greek doctors are of the Egyptian medical school.
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