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>> Dr. Allen Lanham:

I'm Allen Lanham, I'm dean of library services and it's a pleasure to welcome you here to the library, or back to the library for some of you today, and we continue our series of "A Futuristic Look Through Ancient Lenses".

We're studying, this month, ancient Egypt and we have looked at the building of the pyramids last Thursday, we have looked at geological digs on Friday, then on Monday we had a variety of activities including two lectures on religion and the development of religions, tracing them back to ancient Egypt.

We also, that day, went into geography and geology of the country, especially a tomb to ancient aquifers and other things that we might not know about today.

We've looked at documenting life since the ancient civilization times, and yesterday we went through myths of ancient Egypt.

Today, we studied women this morning, and the place, the role of women in ancient Egyptian society, and on a variety of levels I might add and they're in your program.

But tonight we're going into a new realm, and that is of medicine, so you can see if you stick with us throughout the month--in the four or five weeks that we're studying this topic--you will see ancient Egypt from so many facets that you will have a much better understanding of the whole and tonight will be no exception.

We're adding to your knowledge here.

We thank the college of sciences and the biological sciences department for helping us with this presentation.

This series, this symposium continues throughout the month and I request that you take a program in the back and check other opportunities.

We still have many things to study and we've left out a lot, so we will continue to traipse through the period.

And to present our speaker I would introduce Dr. Wafeek Wahby, an Egyptian himself, who will introduce our speaker.

>> Dr. Wafeek Wahby:

Thank you, Dean Lanham.

[applause].

Thank you all for coming at this time of the day and this day of the week.

You have lots of things, I'm sure, you can do and use your time doing it but thanks for coming and I hope you'll be rewarded as you go out of this door better persons, better knowledge and knowing more and in continuation to what Dean Lanham said, this symposium is not intended to tell people everything because we cannot.

It's just like the [unclear dialogue] that you have, and each seminar or session--we have 17 of them and we have 24 speakers--they will give you the key to the room, so each is a key.

So if you like it, you take the key and own your own you open the door and spend as much time as you can.

When I took some students back then to Egypt, I told them in 16 days you'll see what other people see in 60 days because we'll start at 5 o'clock in the morning, finish at 10:30 in the evening and we'll go fast fast fast.

Register here what you'd like to see in the next visit but at least we covered a lot when we went.

That's the same thing, same philosophy of the symposium.

Our speaker tonight is a very busy man and I didn't want to start with this because everybody is busy, but I consider Kip a blessing.

I mean, maybe this is the first time I say it in front of him, I say it on his back before that when I see him in any place, at a distance, I feel peace and I feel that everything is alright.

Something about him is peaceful.

He's so, enough peace inside that [unclear dialogue], I don't know why.

I don't know how many of you would say that, but let me acknowledge Carol, his wife--thank you for coming--and let me also acknowledge [unclear dialogue].

He is a fan of this program from 15 years ago.

He comes and appears and his hair didn't change a bit, same color.

And let me acknowledge Tom Woodall for taking the trouble and time to bring our friend.

So in a nutshell, I'll not say that our speaker is a great speaker or is a nice person or a blessing or anything of these things, but I'll ask him to do the difficult task of talking about philosophy.

That's not tangible, these are tangibles, but philosophy is not.

It's all yours now.

Thank you.

[applause].

>> Dr. Kip McGilliard:

Well thank you for coming.

Dr. Wahby is a good friend of mine and he's also a very persuasive recruiter, and so I want to start out by saying I am no expert on ancient Egyptian medicine but I do love to learn and so this gave me an opportunity to learn many things that I will share with you and hopefully that will encourage you to want to learn new things as well--if not about this culture, then about other cultures and if not about medicine, then about other fields, but learning is an exciting part of being in the university community and I'm glad you're here today.

So the title of my talk is "The Philosophy and Practice of Ancient Egyptian Medicine", and we'll just kind of take you back to ancient Egypt.

My daughter, by the way, wants to visit ancient Egypt and I haven't been able to quite get it clear to her that maybe we have to visit modern Egypt rather than ancient Egypt, but there are opportunities, as this seminar for example to do such.

So this is a civilization that far exceeded, in development, other groups that were existing at the same time elsewhere nearby and we also know more about the Egyptian culture than about other cultures of that time, and there are several reasons for that.

One of them is the development of language and the use of that language.

Another is their arts and the way that their works of art have persisted.

Their buildings is another reason, and some of what I'll share has been gleaned from those sources and then the one unique source is the process of preserving the dead, which you know about as Egyptian mummies, and so through all of this are able to gain a lot of insight into ancient Egypt and ancient Egyptian medicine.

We've had some excellent talks already that shared some aspects of this civilization and I'll touch on a few of those aspects as we go through, but one thing is Egyptian society was ruled by [00:08:15.06]

...called papyri, and of course many of those stones have survived and miraculously some of the papyrus writings have also survived and people who are quite smart have been able to do very effective translations those hieroglyphics.

So from ancient writings, we were able to learn some things about the culture including the proactive of medicine in ancient Egypt.

One issue that was very important to Egyptians was the question of immortality, and immortality was an important part of their religious beliefs--so important that they took great pains to preserve bodies, to hang onto belongings.

The Christian phrase is "you can't take it with you" while the Egyptians, I think, thought they could and although I'm not convinced that they achieved the kind of immortality that they dreamed of, they certainly have achieved immortality in the sense of the continuing of the culture, making that available to future cultures and even of individuals.

So we know Egyptians by name from, what would it be, 4000, 5000, 6000 years ago--know their names and some of their characteristics.

Ryan McDaniel showed this very same picture the other day when he talked about the Christian beliefs in ancient Egypt, and this was from "The Book of the Dead".

Not a Christian belief but this is one of those, this is artwork on a papyrus sheet that kind of explains some of the story of the afterlife, and one of the things that he pointed out and I wanted to re-emphasize is that this individual who is named Ani, he has passed on and he's facing the judgement day and the scales of justice are here and there are various gods located around and his heart is being weighed against the feather of truth.

And the idea is if his heart is pure--so pure that it weighs less than the feather of truth or balances the feather of truth--then he's in and he achieves the afterlife that he desires, but if he has anything weighing on his heart then the balances are going to go down.

One of the reasons I put this up here is because of the importance of the heart, and I'll mention that again in just a few minutes.

So, in belief of the afterlife then, it was important to preserve the remains of individuals, and they, the Egyptians, got some clues from what happened out in the desert environment.

Now, the modern Egyptian civilization developed in the fertile crescent along the Nile River, so there was abundant water at least many times, and with an irrigation system, it was a pretty green area, but you didn't have to go very far from there and you were in the dry desert.

Well, when an animal dies in the desert it's body parts dry out pretty quickly and sometimes it could be preserved for a very long time as a consequence of that rapid drying out, so desiccation was an important part of this process of mummifying.

So the mummies were prepared and balmed, placed inside of elaborate cases such as this or sometimes more simpler devices, and the desiccation process involved packing the inner parts of the body with a substance called natron, and natron was a combination of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate and that tended to just kind of dry that tissue right out, and this can be gleaned from the bottom of dried out lakes that had accumulated this sodium salt.

As they did this embalming practice, they generally left the heart and the kidneys in place in the body.

The heart because it was so important--that was integral to that person's personage.

The kidneys, they speculate they just sort of overlooked because they were kind of back in the back and had a layer over the top of them, so they have just not realized they were there, but the other internal organs--the lungs, the intestines and so on--would be taken out separated and placed into separate jars or wrapped and generally placed between the legs of the deceased.

So the organs were there, but they had been removed from the body.

Interestingly, they just sucked the brains out and discarded them--they didn't see that they were too much valued.

Now there are a number of ways that you can examine mummies, and one of those ways to actually perform autopsies on mummies.

Now normally an autopsy would be performed right after someone had died, but because these bodies were preserved, things could be learned through autopsy afterwards.

The first autopsy was performed in 1825 in England--the first autopsy of a mummy.

This is obviously a more recent one, I think this is from the 1950s and these are rarely done anymore because they are so destructive.

They're invasive to the, kind of the sacred honor of that individual, but they're also destructive in terms of destroying what has been preserved in order to examine what's there and to make such things as tissue slices and examine under the microscope.

So this is rarely done anymore, and fortunately there are additional techniques that can be valuable.

One of those is x-rays.

This is an x-ray of a very well-preserved specimen, and so in this case you see the bones quite clearly and I don't see any particular damage.

Many of the skeletons were, had broken bones that, they were able to ascertain, had occurred after death--in other words, during the embalming process or basically in the process of packing people into maybe boxes that were too small for them.

So often bones were broken either deliberately or accidentally in order to pack them away.

A much more modern technique which reveals even more is CT scans, and with a CT scan normally done on a living individual, you're put into this box and it makes a bunch of noise and it ends up giving you a very clear view as soon as it slices, basically, of your body and all the soft organs.

Very revealing for a living subject.

For Egyptian mummies, of course, many of these tissues have been removed or had undergone some decay, so not quite as revealing but still more revealing than an x-ray would be.

So one of the things they learned from the mummies was examination of the bones, and by examining the bones you can see some differences in height between ancient Egyptians and modern Egyptians and modern Americans.

Egyptian men typically averaged 5 foot, 2 inches tall, which is about four inches shorter than me, and women were about 4-foot-10, so my wife and I would've been a tall couple in Egypt.

This is about 6 inches shorter than the average modern American, and an interesting thing is that the Egyptians of the dynastic era--that is the era of the pharaohs, of the king and the pyramids and all this--were actually about 3 1/2 inches shorter on average than Egyptians from before the dynastic period.

And the reason for this is before the great civilization was built around the Nile Delta, these individuals survived by hunting and so they had much more protein in the diet.

The dynastic Egyptians had depended more on agriculture and consumption of grain so they had  a high carbohydrate diet and protein is very important for building body structure, so they actually lost some height as a consequence of a change of diet away from protein.

Another thing that might explain a shortened height to some degree is the effect of disease, and x-rays would reveal shortened growth lines in individuals.

Those growth lines are an indication--kind of like the rings of a tree--of bone growth, annual bone growth, and so children would frequently have, bodies would frequently show periods of time where there was very little growth for a year or two and that could've been due to disease, serious disease of course would take its toll on growth, or malnutrition.

Now since many of these mummies came from very privileged families, malnutrition was probably not a likely cause for most of them, but disease certainly would do some stunting of the growth, diseases that, with modern medicine, we avoid for the most part.

Some things about the life of Egyptians--it came from their literature as well as some things that could be determined from mummies.

One was the average age of marriage for men was 15 to 20 years of age, for women it was 12 to 13 years of age, so they kind of got started early and that's probably a good thing because half of Egyptians died by the age of 34.

And of course this is based primarily on evidence from the mummies, so it'll be a little bit skewed because you don't recover everybody's remains to be able to figure out what went on.

It was rare to live past the age of 50.

Ninety percent were dead by the age of 50, but there were exceptions to that.

Fro example, Ramses II lived to be 92 years old, so it could be done but it didn't happen real often.

I'm going to give you kind of an exhaustive list here of various diseases that have been diagnosed in mummies based on their examination, and I'll explain a few of these and their significance and skip over a few others.

But first of all affecting the heart, one disease is pericarditis, which is an inflammation of the outer covering of the heart.

There's evidence of atherosclerosis, which is interesting for two reasons.

One is we see that as a modern disease but it was actually very common back then even though people were dying at age 50, but the other kind of puzzling thing is that the Egyptians had a high carbohydrate diet, very little fat in their diet and we generally associate atherosclerosis with a high fat diet, so it didn't match up very well with that.

Atherosclerosis of course can lead to heart attacks and to stroke.

And I should point out that there are many diseases that you could not really diagnose by examination of the mummies because they affect body parts that would've decayed or are complex in the way they are manifested, like diabetes.

It would be hard to look at a mummy and say well this one had diabetes and this one didn't.

The lungs were examined.

It surprises me that there was any tissue surviving from the lungs.

They were able to find emphysema--emphysema is a lung disease where there's a lot of scar tissue, so that may have been some of the reason that they were able to find it.

Pneumoconiosis is a disease of basically damage to the lung by particle matter.

Think about some of the things you've read about in the news with first responders at the World Trade Center after September 11 and many of them are developing lung disease because of the particle matter that they inhaled when the buildings came down.

Well the Egyptians had a constant exposure to sand, and breathing sand would pretty much be a part of their lifestyle, so that would explain the pneumoconiosis.

Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs--common in most civilizations, helped along now by antibiotics--and tuberculosis was common back then, more common than now.

It also affects the bones, so it was easier to diagnose in the mummies.

Kidney stones--they're going to hang around so you'd find those examining a mummy--and glumerulosclerosis is kind of a hardening of the blood vessels in the kidneys, and this is a disease that would be associated with diabetes, so one piece of evidence of diabetes back then.

And the digestive system, most notable would be tapeworm--they found the actual worms, found the eggs of the tapeworms.

Many of these tapeworms are derived from other organisms like snails, which were common in the Nile River Valley.

One in particular, guinea worm, is a worm that begins its life in the intestines.

It then grows out of the intestines and out of the skin, causing a painful eruption in the skin, and guinea worms is a disease that The Carter Center, The World Health Organization and several other organizations are teaming together right now to eliminate from the world--a very aggressive effort.

I read literally an hour ago that there are only three nations in which guinea worm still exists--all three in Africa.

Of course you'd see evidence of bone disease.

Osteoarthritis--arthritis of the bones--was found, and also evidence of violent deaths.

When you find a mummy with a crushed skull you kind of get an idea 'I think what might've happened here' or a piece of weaponry sticking out of them, that generally gives you an idea.

There was also some evidence of stroke, again going along with the athlerosclerosis.

There are few cases of cancer found in mummies.

One reason might be that lack of persistence of those kind of tissues, although some heart cancers certainly would persist, but more likely it was rare.

Two reasons--one is they're dying at fairly young ages and the other is they did not have the exposure to many of the environmental contaminants that we are constantly exposed to in modern society, so not much cancer.

Can also learn some things about the teeth and some things about dental medicine because the teeth are well preserved in mummies.

They had few cavities--probably had something to do with their diet once again.

They did show extreme wear on the crowns of their teeth and this is because they injested a lot of sand.

Some of this would've just gotten mixed in with their food but the other reason is that they ground their bread or their wheat between two stones to make bread, and so you'd have mineral material also mixed in with the bread.

Well this was a serious problem because when you wear the enamel off of the crowns of your teeth than it's prone to infection, it's very painful and that often could be the cause of death of individuals is a tooth infection that could not be overcome.

There were even a few rather creative dentists.

Here's a dental bridge in a mummy.

Two teeth fell out and put them back in using a gold wire, so I'm sure that was quite a surprise when they found that one.

>> male speaker:

How did they make the hole?

>> Dr. McGilliard:

Drills--they actually had drills, they're hand drills, voop, voop, voop.

And yeah they actually had the [unclear dialogue] drilling tools.

This is, by the way--[unclear dialogue]--this is before any kind of anesthesia, either general or local anesthesia.

Well let's talk a little bit about the healers.

There was a theurgic or upper class of healers.

These were mainly priests or were designated as priests.

They practiced rituals and magic.

They called on the gods for healing and they were kind of the upper class for healers.

They also would interpret the dreams of people who were ill, thinking that that might provide them with some clues as to how to heal these individuals.

The inferior class were the physicians.

The physicians were also known as swnw, and the sunu sometimes practiced some of the same things as the priests but they also used a more natural means of healing, which generally involved such things as minor surgeries, use of ointments and various kinds of medication that I'll talk about later on.

So these were the doctors and these were kind of the priest magicians and they sort of all worked together in society and provided what they could to people who were ailing.

The lowest ranks were the bandagers--they usually learned their techniques from the embalmers and they learned how to bandage body parts that needed fixing--and medical trainees, or medical students, would have been pretty low on the scale as they are kind of in the medical establishment today.

Both were managed by the physician so they didn't make their own diagnoses.

They basically did what the physicians recommended that they do.

Well, a concept of dualism is important in talking about ancient Egyptian medicine because what we saw was a transition from this magical treatment to a more rational treatment of disease, and often the two would get all intertwined with each other, so you would use both magical remedies as well as remedies that had a more natural approach, all at the same time.

Two main causes of illness were recognized.

One was displeasure of the gods--you displeased the gods so they made you ill-- and the other is that there were also natural causes, so again you just had sort of a mix of those causes.

A very famous name in the history of medicine is Imhotep.

Imhotep is the first physician known to history.

This is a drawing of him.

He was born around 2650 BC in Memphis--that's not in Tennessee--Memphis, Egypt.

>> female speaker:

Was he like the inferior class physician or [unclear dialogue]?

>> Dr. McGilliard:

He was more of a priestly physician, yes, he was more of a priestly physician.

But he had some natural aspects to his healing.

He served the pharaoh Djoser who was pharaoh for about 20 years, and he served both as the pharaoh's physician and also as his chief architect.

If you attended the earlier seminar that was given by Dr. James Hoffmeier, he talked about Imhotep being the architect and builder--not by himself of course--but the builder of Egypt's first, or the world's first, pyramid and this is the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, which was built for Djoser.

After his death, he was elevated to the status of an Egyptian god, so he went from being a true living individual to someone recognized as a god of medicine.

Many hundreds of statuettes like this with Imhotep sitting, holding a scroll-because he was also a scribe--honored him.

Most of these, all of these were made hundreds of years after his death, so they don't actually represent what he actually looked like but just someone's attempt to deify him.

He was also commemorated in a 1928 stamp in Egypt.

This was a stamp honoring the International Congress of Medicine and also celebrating the hundredth  centenary of the medical school in Cairo.

There also were female physicians, and this is unusual in these cultures and these times.

Peseshet, who is drawn here, is recognized as the earliest known female physician and her role was described as overseer of the female physicians, so she was kind of in charge.

There are more than 100 prominent female physicians who are named by various scrolls in history.

Now some interesting things about anatomy and physiology--and, by the way, I was introduced as being in the Biological Sciences Department, which I am, but what I enjoy teaching and what I spend most of my time teaching is physiology, so this part was especially of interest to me.

The process of embalming offered the opportunity to study the internal organs in a way that otherwise would not have been provided.

It was because of the high elevation, the high status of the dead, it was thought not right to do autopsies or to do any kind of examination of bodies after they died except in the process of embalming, so some things could be learned during this process.

Clearly the heart was the most important organ in the body, and it serves as a sea of intelligence and of emotion.

As I mentioned before, the brain was not seen to be of any importance.

One individual did recognize that when there was brain damage, people sometimes had trouble walking, so they saw a connection there but that was about as far as it went.

Air was recognized as vital to life.

Of course this was thousands of years before oxygen was discovered, and the scheme that was laid out was air passes through the trachea and the heart and then into the heart and the lungs, and then it passes from the heart and the lungs through the blood to other organs called metu, and then from the metuit flows through secondary metu. which would be smaller vessels, to the surface of the body, where this would then be released as sweat or tears or semen or urine.

So basically they saw a flow that started out really pretty accurate, until you get to those very tiny blood vessels and then they have them going out the skin instead of the blood circulating.

Got to remember, no microscopes at that time either--it would be thousands of years before the capillaries would be identified.

Disease was thought to be transported as a foul substance called ukhedu to the various organs.

And you think about the things that smell the foulest about the human body--in life and in death--you kind of get an idea where they get this idea of the ukhedu.

So the goal of healing then was to expel ukhedu and a good way to do that would be through the feces.

Pus was recognized as the ukhedu trying to get out of the body, trying to escape from the body, and so the drainage of pus was encouraged, which turns out to be a good idea.

So the buildup of ukhedu in the organs--even a slow buildup--leads to decay of the flesh, which we know now is aging, and so it was routine for people to take laxatives, get those ukhedu out through the feces so they wouldn't build up and cause our bodies to decay internally.

Now, much of what we know about the healing arts--most of what we know about the healing arts--comes from various written documents, various papyruses and I'm going to mention a few but certainly not all of them.

One was called the Kahun papyrus and I mention this because it's recognized as the oldest medical papyrus, and this was from 1800 BC, and it focused primarily on gynecological diseases  and on pregnancy.

I'll mention couple of things that came from that as well as other sources later on.

The Hearst papyrus, according to what I read, is actually older--2000 BC--but there are doubts as to its authority and one of the reasons for those doubts is the incredibly good condition that it is in.

But nonetheless it contained many magical remedies that were consistent with other documents from the time, so perhaps it was a more modern copy of a more ancient document--hard to tell.

Now, belief in the supernatural was very important, and there were no hospitals in ancient Egypt but temples were places of healing, so people would go to the temple in search of help from the physicians and priests.

I won't share all of the things about the supernatural because I don't know them, but I'll share one interesting family, and this is Isis, kind of a mother earth god, and Osiris who is a sun god, and together they created agriculture and the medical arts--and by the way, now we're in the area of myth.

These are not real individuals who lived but gods who were in Egyptian mythology.

They had a son named Horus, and Horus had healing powers and had the gift of prophecy, so it was common in places of healing to have statues of Horus.

Many of them had Horus standing on a crocodile, and I didn't get quite the connection of that one--I'm still kind of curious about that one.

Now Isis was important because she reassembled the parts of her husband, Osiris, when he was hacked to pieces by his evil brother, and that's pretty impressive healing powers to be able to put someone together after they've been hacked apart.

So she became one of the goddesses of healing, and their son Horus also had his own powers that came kind of the hard way.

One thing was he was bitten by a snake when he was young and he was then healed by another healing god named Thoth, and from that point on he was immune to snake bites, so he was one that they frequently turned to for healing--or his image, his statue for example--for healing of snake bites.

He also is reported to have had an eye destroyed in a battle, and that eye was restored back to health as well, so he's also the patron god of eye doctors, so Horus had kind of a rough time of it--again this is in mythology--but he always was healed, he always bounced back and so he was recognized as a very important figure in healing.

Amulets were often worn or carried by individuals to help them either ward off diseases or to provide healing for diseases.

Here are some examples, museum pieces--really beautiful pieces of art--showing different body parts or animals--hippopotamus and beetles there.

The Tawaret is kind of interesting. 

This is a figure of a hippo standing upright, and Taweret was the goddess of fertility.

There's Horus and Isis, and I never did figure out who that third person was but I think it's somebody's sister.

Now, not only were there supernatural ways of healing or beliefs about healing, but also there were natural means and many of these natural means appeared with the Edwin Smith papyrus--and by the way, each of these papyruses is named not after the writer obviously but after the person who revealed this papyrus to civilization.

We usually received it as a gift or purchased it at a flea market and realized it was a great value to society, so the Edwin Smith papyrus comes from about 1600 BC, and this was the first of the literature to contain a rational, scientific approach to medicine.

It talked about surgical practices, generally pretty minor surgery, but it also pointed out that doctors tended to specialize.

So, generally speaking, you were a doctor of eyes or of hands or of feet or of the bowels, so the doctors had their specialties.

You can see this one, papyrus was in pretty good shape.

There are surgical tools that have been recovered, evidence of course that surgery really did occur in those ancient Egyptian times.

Here are a couple of examples,  a variety of examples of surgical tools.

And one of the first recorded types of surgery was circumcision.

This was found painted on the walls of Ank-Mahor, and it involves two adolescent boys being circumcised and it has various quotations around there which is the dialogue, kind of like the comic-strip balloons that go along with that.

So one of them is saying, for example, 'hold him fast, don't let him fall'.

Most of the surgeries though--and I should mention, circumcision was not done to infants in ancient Egypt but was done at the age, at the time of puberty, and it was done for both health and perhaps supernatural religious reasons.

Most surgery involved repairing of wounds of some kind, and so the Egyptians were skilled at splinting broken bones, at stitching cuts and at bandaging wounds, and there are instructions in these papyruses about how to do those.

There even were prosthetics.

This is another one of those amazing mummy finds--an artificial big toe that obviously a probably well-to-do Egyptian carried to his grave.

I don't remember exactly who that was, but even prosthetics was practiced.

Obstetrics and gynecology is important in any culture because it has to do with maintaining the reproductive ability of women, and caring for the birth of children, and I mentioned the one papyrus that emphasized that area in particular.

So some of the areas where medicine was practiced, of course various diseases of the female reproductive tract.

There were fertility aids, things that could be taken or practices or chants that would aid in increasing fertility.

There were contraceptives at that time, and one of the contraceptive methods was for a woman to drink a mixture of beer, celery and oil four days in a row at the proper time, and that was supposed to help provide contraception.

Sometimes substances were applied to the vagina to increase the acidity of the vagina.

Now they probably didn't know what was going on there, but sperm actually did not do well in an acidic environment, so it had its effectiveness.

One of these preparations was a wad of crocodile dung mixed in sour milk, so it blocked the sperm and provided the acid environment.

[laughter].

Probably those medical trainees were the ones who went out and got the crocodile dung, I would guess.

They had pregnancy tests.

One was described, that has been tested in modern times and found to be 70 percent effective--I don't remember the details but it basically had to do with the woman peeing on a patch of seeds, different kinds of grass seeds, and if one kind grew up she was going to have  boy, if the other kind grew up she was going to have a girl and if nothing grew she was infertile.

I shouldn't say infertile, she was not pregnant.

Turned out to be 70 percent effective in this modern task in predicting pregnancy, and it was about 50 percent effective in determining the gender of the child, so not too bad.

Got to think about that one for a minute.

[laughter].

Sagging breasts, even that there was a cure offered and it was to smear the blood from a pre-pubertal female onto the breasts.

Apparently they thought that would contain some healing device that would youthen up the breasts.

Child birth was an interesting process in ancient Egypt.

It was generally done sitting on a birthing stool, usually made of bricks so it was in an upright position--you have the benefit of gravity work in this case--and the person was not attended by a physician but would be helped by midwives or by relatives.

And I wanted to share a story about that from the Bible.

You may be familiar with the story of Moses and his being sent down the Nile River in a basket early in the book of Exodus, but there's a story that immediately precedes that story, and it had to do with--it's in Exodus 1, verses 15 through 21--and it tells about the oppression of the Israelites who were living in the land of Egypt at that time, through slavery and through forced labor.

And the king was concerned because they were growing in population at a very rapid rate and he was afraid that they were going to become very powerful and either leave or overtake the state and so he wanted to destroy the male children.

And so he asked that the leaders of the Hebrew midwives that when a woman, a Hebrew woman was on the birthing stool, to watch her and if she gave birth to a boy child, to kill the child.

If she gave birth to a girl child, she could let it live.

And so, the midwives reported back to the king and apparently they didn't do very well at this task because what they said is, to the king, the Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women--they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.

They were probably lying but at any rate they gave credit to the vigorousness of the Hebrew woman that they were not able to catch them on the birthing stool and destroy the male children, so then the king went to plan B, which was just to go after male babies much later after they were born and that's where Moses had to escape from his family--another story for another time.

Now mothers typically nursed for about three years after giving birth and when one is lactating generally they don't ovulate so are less likely to become pregnant, and so this naturally spaced the children three or four years apart, and the average Egyptian family was not real large.

A woman would typically have four children.

So, natural birth control once the first child was born.

There's quite a list of medicinal remedies that are available, and many of these are listed in another papyrus called the Ebers papyrus as well as many others.

The Ebers papyrus is considered to be the oldest complete medical book in the world.

This was actually 110 pages in length, it contained 700 different magical formulas and remedies using natural products--whoever transcribed that didn't really get the complete story because they seemed to have stopped at about here on their way down through the body, working through the various body parts and organ systems, and they gave a hint that they had more to write, so apparently the rest of the body was lost from these papyruses so it would have been an even lengthier medical book if it had survived.

The prescriptions that were included in this medical book as well as the Hearst papyrus included the name and the amounts of the ingredients that were used, directions for preparing the medicine and instructions for taking the medicine for the patient.

Various routes of administration were used but the main one by far was ointments.

Ointments that would be spread on the skin or placed in the eye or in the various orifices to treat whatever diseases were occurring in those places.

There also were some oral medications, medications that would be taken by mouth.

The main solvents that were used are listed here.

Water, of course, is an excellent solvent.

Honey was very commonly used as a solvent in ancient Egypt, and it was thought to have healing powers by itself, even without the additional ingredients.

And, as a matter of fact, it does have antibacteriacidal properties.

The reason is, honey contains a very high concentration of sugar and when you place that on living tissue it tends to dry up those tissues and that would include bacteria that were exposed to it, so it would tend to kind of drain the water out of these organisms.

Beer, why not, vegetable oils and animal fats were also used.

Some of the active ingredients--one of the most common active ingredients is called djaret, and no one has been able to definitely translate what this plant material was, so we really don't know what it was but it was used for treatment of diarrhea and for the treatment of eye problems.

Very commonly used plant material.

Frankincense you may have heard of from the Christmas story, and frankincense is an aromatic resin from the Boswellia tree pictured up above, and the resin is shown down below, and it's known to have analgesic properties--that is to deaden pain and it was applied to the head or the limbs for treatment of pain.

Castor bean--we know this in the form of castor oil--but these beans were used as a laxative.

They come from the ricinus plant.

It was generally used topically, I mean it was also used topically besides being used as a laxative and Dr. Carlsward tells me that this is a very very toxic bean, so not to be trifled with in terms of using the proper dose.

Aloe was used for its healing properties.

You may be familiar with that because aloe vera is an herb that is used in many topical preparations that people use today for their skin.

It was used at that time for eye problems and interestingly it was thought to convert immortality because there were drawings of aloe plants in many of the temples and inscriptions having to do with immortality.

Figs were consumed, mixed with other medications, for treatment of abdominal pains, urinary tract disorders and effective in hippopotamus bites.

[laughter].

A plant called colocynth, which is kind of a cucumber-like plant, was a very strong laxative and it also was used to perform chemical abortions because it caused such strong contractions of the uterus, so it was kind of a brutal medication but if you really needed a strong laxative or you wanted to perform an abortion, it would be effective.

There were some products derived from animals--I'll just mention a few.

The semen from a stallion could be taken to restore sexual drive.

Ravens' blood was used to treat hair problems--remember the Egyptians all had dark hair.

Fish skulls were utilized for treatment of headache, and pig eyes were ground up with other things for treatment of blindness.

Malachite is an interesting one--this is a copper salt that was ground up and used for green eye shadow.

It's a very very beautiful stone and it was mined in that area and it was noticed that the miners did not seem to succumb to epidemics that sometimes came through the area, and so it began to be a recommended use, malachite as a topical medication to ward off epidemic diseases.

And it was used only topically, and people also wore beautiful malachite jewelry, and it was thought that that would also provide some protection.

It takes me back to my grandmother who wore about six copper rings on her hands because she believed that copper warded off arthritis, so we continue to see some healing powers of copper, and indeed it has antibacteriacidal effectiveness,

I'm going to close with some medical advice that comes from some of these writings that we can all take to heart, in one way or another.

First one, "Do not slight a small illness for which there is a remedy; use the remedy.”

Another one which is very important in the use of antibiotics today-- “Do not say ‘My illness has passed, I will not use medication.’”

You're given all those antibiotics, you take the full course okay.

Useful advice for today.

Next one--you can see the medical establishment hasn't changed much--“A remedy is effective only through the hand of its physician.”

[laughter].

The supernatural aspect, "“A timely remedy is to prevent illness by having the greatness of the god in your heart."

And for those of us who are getting older, “Do not be despondent when you are ill; your death is not made yet.”

And for those of you who are younger, “Do not pamper yourself when you are young, lest you be weak when you are old.”

Now, because we are doing this in the library, I did want to share some of the resources that I used, certainly not all of them, but the top two are both books that are available here in Booth Library as soon as I turn them back in--"Daliy Life of the Ancient Egyptians" had just one chapter on medicine and mathematics, but it was a very informative chapter and the other chapters covered the various other topics that people have been talking about during this seminar.

And this illustrated history of nursing was also quite excellent with just a few pages, very well-written about Egyptian culture, so if any of you are interested in the nursing field, this is an interesting book to look at.

Interestingly, after sharing all this information about medicine in ancient Egypt they said there was no evidence that there was nursing at that time, but we all know the civilization could not survive without nurses, so certainly there was one form of nursing if it was not described by a name that we recognize.

And finally this book, thanks to the interlibrary loan department, came all the way from Atlanta, Georgia after it had been discarded from a library in Houston some years ago, and I was very grateful to have that because this medical skills book provided me with a lot of valuable information.

So I will close there, and invite any questions that you have.

>> Dr. Wahby:

Let's give him a hand please.

[applause].

And as you see, we have 5 minutes to go to 8 o'clock and I know you have other things to do, so in the 5 minutes we want to do lots of things.

So first, if you have a big 'wow' in your mouth, it is time to say it when I point at you.

>> audience members:

Wow.

>> Dr. McGilliard:

Wow.

Dr. Wahby:

Say after me if you agree, "Thank you Dr. McGilliard".

>> audience members:

Thank you Dr. McGilliard".

>> Dr. Wahby:

For accepting to speak to us.

>> Dr. McGilliard:

You are too kind.

>> Dr. Wahby:

[unclear dialogue] this would sound egoistic, say "Thank you Dr. Wahby".

>> audience members:

Thank you Dr. Wahby.

>> Dr. Wahby:

"For being so persistent" and again back to him for accepting.

No amount of persistence would do unless the humble [unclear dialogue] would accept and give us this, and he does it so humbly and in sweet serving spirit, and I guess this could go to CAA, the CAA and have the course for credit hours, students can study this.

>> Dr. McGilliard:

Oh, don't you wish you could get three credit hours for being here tonight.

[laughter].

>> Dr. Wahby:

Very good--questions, comments, yes.

>> male speaker:

Is there any way to know the difference between illnesses and accidents?

In other words, did the literature give you any clue as to how many people died from accidents--infection for example, or whatever.

>> Dr. McGilliard:

This kind of literature was more about individual cases or remedies, so it really didn't provide that sort of statistical look.

Perhaps from some other sources you could find information like that.

It's interesting because Imhotep, besides being in the king's court, also was supervising this big pyramid scheme and obviously there would have been a lot of accidents in the construction of those kind of things and he may have learned some things from that, but it's easy to tell from looking at remains of mummies whether they had succumb to a disease or an accident, but the actual statistics I couldn't tell you that.

From the mummies of the royal family, there were a few that died from violence but most of them appeared to have died from natural causes.

>> Dr Wahby:

Other question or comments.

Okay, if you have more questions come to you after, please email him  or email me or email Dean Lanham, yes, because we will put this online and will take your questions, he will answer them and we'll put them online like a big blog or something, so many people who missed this class, or this whatever you call it, would benefit of it and maybe reminder for you if you didn't take notes.

Any last words for anybody?

Dean Lanham, anything?

>> Dr. Lanham:

No, just to thank Dr. McGilliard for being with us this evening and sharing so much in a short period of time.

>> Dr. McGilliard:

Thank you for being such a nice audience.

[applause].