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MS Word VersionWhat 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.
The papyrus dates to the 17th century B.C. - about nine centuries after the great pyramids were built, but about a century before the time Moses is believed to have lived. While there are fragments of medical writing that are somewhat older, experts say, none are nearly as extensive
The papyrus uses words that were already archaic then, and the writer explains them, evidence that it is a copy of a document that was a few hundred years older. Writing with black and red ink, the ancient scribe used hieratic, a sort of cursive writing that is more abstract than the familiar picture-writing of hieroglyphics.
The author documented 48 medical cases, starting at the top of the head and working steadily down as far as the upper arm and chest. There, the papyrus stops mid-case, so experts assume that originally it continued to the feet.
It deals mostly with traumatic injuries like punctures and broken bones, so it may have been a manual for battle wounds, but one case addresses surgical removal of a growth - a cyst or tumor - on the chest. There is one lighter bit among all that gravity - someone added to the original text a recipe for an ointment to make the user look younger.
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