The Medical Skills of Ancient Egypt

original green cloth, as new, pp.xii-196, map and illustrations. Testo inglese, english text. Men and women who lived along the Nile two to five thousand years ago were probably as concerned with their own health as we are today. They suffered from many of the illnesses that afflict us?if they lived long enough?although they had others that are rare in modern America. Evidence of disease and healers in ancient Egypt can be found in papyrus textbooks of trauma surgery, gynecology, and of what we might call internal medicine/' in inscriptions and paintings in tombs and temples, and in X-rays, CT scans, and autopsies of mummies, as well as in non-medical literary texts and letters. The Egyptians may not have been the first to concern themselves with illness and its treatment, but their writings on those subjects are among the oldest that have survived. Both the healing arts and clearly identifiable physicians (including at least one woman) emerged during the earliest centuries of pharaonic civilization as a comfortable mixture of magical, religious, and lay practices and practitioners. This book draws on recent research and experimentation, as well as on classical studies of medical Egyptology, to explain?insofar as possible after all these centuries?what Egyptian healers were able to do for their patients, and why they did it. An Appendix includes those drugs used by healers along the Nile that have been identified. The author, J. Worth Estes, M.D., is Professor of Pharmacology at the Boston University School of Medicine, where he teaches modern medical pharmacology and focuses his research on how and why physicians in the past have used drugs to alleviate their patients' ills.