Every physician today can tell you a thing or two about it: Without anatomy and knowledge about the structure of the body, there would be no modern medicine! We would know nothing about how diseases develop and, consequently, nothing about how to treat them. So for at least half a year, medical students are maltreated with Latin-Greek technical terms for every conceivable body structure and its localisation, until at the end of the day they can recite them in their sleep. This procedure has proven itself (as much as it is cursed in medical school), since the physician would really only be "fishing in the dark" if the exact structure of a body was not clear to him.
We have already seen that the Egyptian physicians often really hit the mark in treating diseases and were able to cure their patients of many ailments. In this context, we sometimes hear (also from Egyptologists) that the Egyptians produced such good physicians because they knew so much about anatomy and the human body through the process of mummification and the associated removal of organs. But is this really the case?
Although the details of mummification changed in the course of Egyptian history, the basic form remained the same for a long time: The lungs, liver, stomach and intestines were removed and buried in separate vessels called canopic jars. The heart sometimes remained in place, sometimes it was removed, mummified separately and returned to the body. We know from mummy examinations that the Egyptian embalmers made an incision about 6.5 cm long on the left side of the abdomen in order to be able to remove the organs afterwards. Even here there is a big difference to later, "real" anatomical examinations (which began at the earliest in the time of the Ptolemies, i.e. from 300 BCE onwards): the embalmers worked "blindly", so to speak, they did not see what they were doing, rather they felt the structures and then removed them. That the kidneys were therefore not removed in most cases was certainly due to the fact that they can be found towards the back and the embalmers were not aware of their presence.
Besides these considerations, it is worth taking a look at the medical texts. From this we learn, for example, that the Egyptians had missed the fact that there was a trachea AND an oesophagus - only a "cervical tube" is mentioned. The image of the "mt-vessels" also seems particularly curious to us today. Probably linked to river arms that span the entire country, the idea prevailed that the entire body was criss-crossed by these "channels" (mt also means "channel"). So far this may indeed apply to blood vessels, although the importance of blood as a "nutrient" was probably not clear to the Egyptians. However, in the Egyptian imagination, these vessels transported every bodily fluid, from water to urine, excrement and seminal fluid. This shows that a more precise differentiation of organ structures did not exist and the course of pathways in the body remained unclear.
"It has been rightly said that science as such was first brought to humanity by the Greeks. At least the astonishment at a new phenomenon, the questioning and the effort to find a satisfactory answer. And such questions, such attention and listening were obviously far from the Egyptian, he had not yet learned that. [...] He was not curious enough to be able to really ask and think scientifically."
This is what Hermann Grapow wrote in 1954 in "Grundriss der Medizin der Alten Ägypter", a truly fundamental work of medical history. He thus justified the lack of in-depth anatomical knowledge, when at the same time bodies were opened and viscera removed in such large numbers and with such regularity. But to accuse the Egyptians of lacking scientific, structured thinking is surely going too far. It might be much more likely that, as in later times and cultures, it was a taboo, if not a prohibition, to open the human body and look too closely at what was behind the "divine" creation. Mummification will have been an exception here, since it was itself a religious-cultic act. This is matched by the fact that not a single depiction has come down to us that shows the "surgical" part of mummification (and I therefore had difficulty illustrating today's article). The medical papyri are also completely devoid of illustrations; the Egyptian's strength obviously lay in the written explanation
Only the anatomy of animals seems to have been understood to a larger extent; there are some hieroglyphs that depict animal organs quite correctly. However, the assumption would probably not have fitted into the Egyptian (or any other) worldview that there is not much difference (anatomically) between animals and humans...
These reflections on the lack of anatomical knowledge are in no way intended to diminish the achievements of the Egyptian physicians, who did their best within the bounds of their possibilities; however, today's medical students should not conclude from this that it could also be done without anatomy. 😉
Literature
- B. Brier, R.S. Wade, "Surgical procedures during ancient Egyptian Mummification" in ZÄS 126 (1999), pp. 89-97.
- H. Grapow, Grundriss der Medizin der Alten Ägypter I. Anatomie und Physiologie, Berlin, 1954.
Cover Picture
Relief with medical instruments from the Temple of Kom Ombo,
Originator: Olaf Tausch, 11.3.2011, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
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