ANCIENT MEDICINE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 256, 29 October 1929, Page 6

ANCIENT MEDICINE.

Lord Moynihan, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, in a lecture of Leeds recently, spoke of the remarkable surgical operations of 1000 B.C. and mentioned the connection that existed between the profession of medicine and religion. In ancient Egypt medicine was entirely in the hands of the priests, and all medical practice was rigidly prescribed by the sacred books of Thoth,

Ie pod of healing

Many examples of the instru-

ments used by the surgeons of ancient Egypt have been preserved, and some of the mummies reveal

traces of operations. But it was in India and Greece that surgery reached the highest excellence. The Sanskrit Susruta of the second century A.D. describes over one hundred steel instruments and

many difficult major, operations. The Egyptians had discovered some kind of anaesthetic, as there are several allusions to means of deadening pain, and it is said the "Menrphite Stone," on being applied to a wound, produced anaesthesia, and so rendered difficult operations possible. Ammianus tells us that "it was enough for a doctor to say he had studied in Egypt to recommend him." and we hear of the fame of Egyptian doctors in Rome, and at the courts of Darius and Cyrus. The Berlin papyrus gives an example of diagnosis of a case of gastric feyerj and the fibers"papyrus tells us how prescriptions were written. Drugs were chiefly of vegetable origin, but some mineral drugs were used, such as alum, saltpetre and sulphate of copper. The Ebers papyrus shows that it was customary for doctors to* feel the pulse, and they seem to have had some knowledge of the circulation of the blood. It is strange to find that three or four thousand years before Christ principles of medicine were taught and practised which are the foundations of the medical science of to-day. W.M.