Secrets of the Mummy's Medicine Chest (original) (raw)

New York|Secrets of the Mummy's Medicine Chest

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/nyregion/secrets-of-the-mummys-medicine-chest.html

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Sept. 10, 2005

The ancient Egyptians left proof of their scientific prowess for people to marvel at for millennia. Their engineering skills can still be seen at Giza, their star charts in Luxor, their care for head wounds on Fifth Avenue.

Head wounds? Yes, and the ancients treated broken arms, cuts, even facial wrinkles -- vanity is not a modern invention -- and they used methods as advanced as rudimentary surgery and a sort of proto-antibiotics.

As for Fifth Avenue, it, like the Valley of the Kings, is a place of hidden treasures. What researchers call the world's oldest known medical treatise, an Egyptian papyrus offering 4,000-year-old wisdom, has long dwelled in the rare books vault at the New York Academy of Medicine.

It is an extraordinary remnant of a culture that was already ancient when Rome was new and Athens was a backwater -- Egypt's stone monuments endure, but the scrolls made of pulped reeds have mostly been lost. One expert, James H. Breasted, who translated the papyrus in the 1920's, called it "the oldest nucleus of really scientific knowledge in the world." Yet relatively few people know of it, and fewer have seen it.

It is about to become much better known. After a short trip down Fifth (insert down-the-Nile metaphor here) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the papyrus will go on public display, probably for the first time, on Tuesday, as part of the Met's exhibition "The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt." The show will also include items like a CAT scan of a mummy, surgical needles and other medical artifacts.

"What they knew about the body is quite striking, though they did not always understand it," said James Allen, curator of Egyptian art at the Met, whose new translation of the papyrus appears in the exhibition catalog.

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