10
Medicine and Magic
S
ix volumes containing 'the secrets of the physicians' are said to have been kept in Egyptian temples. Medical works were certainly handed down over long periods so that glosses became incorporated into the texts. Some of the surviving papyri are specialist works; others contain treatments for a wide variety of conditions and even household hints and recipes for cosmetics. This makes them similar to the household books of 'tried' remedies and recipes compiled by literate European housewives from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries AD. The specialist vocabulary of the medical papyri is extremely difficult to translate, so the exact nature of many of the illnesses and treatments remains uncertain. From the sixth century BC onwards, additional information is provided by Greek medical writers who claimed that their theories were based on the principles of Egyptian medicine. The extent of the debt owed to Egypt by Greek medicine is much disputed. Some of the ideas in these works may have come from Egypt, but the terminology is far more Greek than Egyptian. As early as the third century BC, some Greek thinkers tried to formulate distinctions between 'rational medicine' and treatments based on superstition or supernatural intervention. When the papyri from Egypt were first translated, scholars put forward the theory that medicine had enjoyed a golden age of scientific rationalism in the third millennium BC, but that thereafter it was increasingly contaminated by magic. Only a random selection of papyri has survived, so it is impossible to be sure what range of medical texts was in circulation at any particular period. It is doubtful whether there ever was a time in Egyptian history when medicine and magic were not complementary parts of a doctor's skills. Most of the ten or so surviving papyri contain a mixture of medical and magical remedies. The first editors and translators sometimes omitted the magical parts. In the originals, the 'rational' cures and the spells are not usually separated. Both can be introduced by the same words meaning 'diagnosis' and 'prescription'. The papyri tend to be grouped in sections relating to the type of complaint rather than to the methods of treatment. The few papyri, such as the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, which seem 133