QUACK DOCTORS

Southland Times, Issue 18973, 21 June 1923, Page 9

QUACK DOCTORS

3400-YEAR-OLD TREATISE. A roll of Egyptian papyrus over 15 feet long, and consisting of part of a treatise on medicine as practised 3400 years ago, is being translated by Mr J. H. Breasted, director of the Oriental Institute, Chicago University. It will be issued by the New York Historical Society, and a good deal 'of interest has been aroused in medical circles, because, as the British Medical Journal points out, the document differs strikingly from all the other known Egyptian medical books, as it is not a list of recipes or prescriptions, but an orderly arrangement of cases carefully observed. ‘The important part of it is contained in 17 columns in the front of the roll, in which there is a portion of an ancient treatise on surgery and external medicine,” adds the journal. “Unfortunately, the beginning, which dealt with the head, is lost, and the scribe did not continue his copy farther down than the thorax and the beginning of the spine.” Various forms of injury are dealt with, and the mind of the ancient Egyptian is revealed as interested in the observable facts of science for their own sake.

A roll of papyrus found buried with a man in Upper Egypt, is discussed in the College of Ambulance. The writer says knowledge of anatomy was limited to the embalmers.

The papyrus opens by saying the heart is the beginning of all the parts. Life was a breath, death the departure of the breath.

It was .laid down as a golden rule that everyone once a month should take physic. The women and children might take their dose in honey, and very small children in milk, but the men must take it in its unmitigated nastiness.

The quack doctor had a good time 300 years ago. There are prescriptions for poultices, inhalations, tinctures, embrocations, powders, ointments, plasters, fumigations, lotions, pills, draughts, and, the more ingredients, the more virtue was in them, so that 35 different things are put into cne poultice. Some of the prescriptions are humorous:—

| To cure an ear abscess: Boil wax I and oil together. Spread on a linen bandage, but do not tie it on too tight. ; A remedy for deafness: Red lead and 1 resin from the Am tree, grind to powi der and rub in olive oil. Put it on the ■ ear. For a diseased eye: Take a I human brain, divide it in half, add to | one-half honey, and anoint the eye | with it in the evening. Take the other i half of the brain, dry it and finely j grind it. Anoint the eye with it in I the morning. For mosquito bites: Rub • the fat of a weedpecker on the body. If a girl had a rival and wanted to I make the latter’s hair fall out “ycu must catch a worm and gather the flower of a sepet, boil them in oil, and manage somehow to convey it to her head. The antidote was to “pound I and boil a tortoiseshell, and mix it ■ with hippopotamus fat, and anoint herself with it very, very often.”