Oldest surviving, not first
No one knows who first treated a wound or an illness in Egypt, and no text can show it. What exists is a group of medical papyri, and the two longest and best known, the Edwin Smith and the Ebers papyri, are copies made around 1600 to 1550 BCE. Both seem to preserve material composed centuries earlier. They are among the oldest surviving medical texts in the world, but neither is necessarily the first medical writing, and cuneiform drug lists and prescriptions from Mesopotamia are also very old. The descriptions below should be read as a record of what Egyptian physicians were taught around the middle of the second millennium BCE.
None of these remedies should be tried today. Many are ineffective, and some could be harmful.
The Edwin Smith papyrus
The American collector Edwin Smith bought this papyrus in Luxor in 1862, and it was translated and published in the twentieth century. It is a manual of injuries, with 48 cases arranged roughly from the head downwards. The text stops partway through the upper body, apparently where the copyist ended. The language contains old-fashioned forms, which is one reason scholars think the original composition is much earlier than the copy.
Each case follows a pattern: a title, the examination (“if you examine a man with…”), a diagnosis, and a verdict of one of three kinds. The physician could declare an ailment he would treat, one he would fight with, or one that could not be treated. Treatments are mostly practical. Fresh wounds were closed with stitches or with strips of adhesive linen, and a piece of fresh meat was commonly applied on the first day, probably to help stop bleeding. After that, dressings of grease, honey and lint were used, and broken bones were splinted and bandaged. There are only a few spells, and the text is often described as notably practical.
The Ebers papyrus
The German Egyptologist Georg Ebers acquired this papyrus in 1873. It is a long scroll, roughly twenty metres, covering a huge range of complaints and containing hundreds of prescriptions. Its calendar notes point to a date around 1550 BCE. It reads less like a single treatise than a compilation of older collections.
Subjects include digestive upsets, skin conditions, burns, eye diseases, worms, headaches, tumours, dental problems and women’s health. There are also passages on the heart and its vessels, and a short section on mental distress. Recipes call for plant products such as myrrh, cumin and castor oil, fruits, honey, beer and wine as carriers, minerals, and animal fats and other animal materials. Preparations were taken as drinks and pills, rubbed on as ointments, laid on as poultices, burned for fumigation or given as enemas.
Wound care and honey
Honey is among the most frequent ingredients, especially in dressings. Modern studies have found that honey can inhibit bacteria, so it is possible that some Egyptian wound dressings had a real effect. Whether the Egyptians understood why, or chose honey for other reasons such as its stickiness and protective coating, is unknown. Fat and lint formed a barrier over the wound, and the Edwin Smith papyrus gives follow-up instructions for later days.
Other medical papyri
Several other papyri add to the picture. The Kahun papyrus, from about 1800 BCE, concerns women’s health and pregnancy. Others include the Hearst and Berlin papyri, the London medical papyrus and a papyrus in Brooklyn dealing with snakebite. Together they show that medical knowledge was written down in manuals aimed at working physicians, and that a written tradition for treating illness stretched back many centuries before the Ebers copy.
Spells and drugs together
Many Ebers remedies come with a spell to be said while the medicine is prepared or applied, and some conditions are treated almost entirely by incantation. Such spoken charms belong to a wider Egyptian magical practice. Rather than seeing these as separate, the Egyptians seem to have expected words and substances to work together. Modern readers have to be careful, because the names of many ingredients are uncertain, and an ancient word may not mean the plant that translators have guessed.
How these treatments compare with other traditions
Egyptian doctors were not alone in compiling prescriptions. Mesopotamian healers also worked with long lists of drugs and a mixture of diagnosis and ritual, and many of the plant-based remedies in both traditions belong to the wider history of ancient herbal remedies. Later Greek authors speak well of Egyptian drug knowledge, and the more systematic Greco-Roman medicine took shape in contact with that background. In each case the question of who influenced whom is hard to settle.
What the texts show
The papyri suggest a profession that examined patients, classified cases, made a prognosis and recorded results. They also show a willingness to give up on cases that were beyond help. At the same time, the remedies are a mixture of the sensible, the harmless and the useless. The value of these texts is as evidence for how some of the earliest surviving medicine was organised, not as a source of cures.