26/04/2024
1600 B.C. ~ The Edwin Smith Egyptian Papyrus.
The Honey Prescription: The Amazing Power of Honey as Medicine. Follow:
Historical Honeybee Articles - Beekeeping History
Honey has been used in wound healing for thousands of years, with the first record of it is found in the Edwin Smith papyrus (1600 BCE), being mentioned 31 times in the 48 cases found in this ancient surgical manual.
The Edwin Smith Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical text named after the dealer who bought it in 1862, and the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma. This document, which may have been a manual of military surgery, describes 48 cases of injuries, fractures, wounds, dislocations and tumors, many of them including honey as a remedy. In this series, we will explore the remedies in the papyrus which include honey in the treatment. The Edwin Smith Papyrus presents a rational and scientific approach to medicine in ancient Egypt, in which medicine and magic do not conflict.
The Edwin Smith papyrus is a scroll 4.68 m in length. The recto (front side) has 377 lines in 17 columns, while the verso (backside) has 92 lines in five columns. Aside from the fragmentary outer column of the scroll, the remainder of the papyrus is intact, although it was cut into one-column pages some time in the 20th century. It is written right-to-left in hieratic, the Egyptian cursive form of hieroglyphs, in black ink with explanatory glosses in red ink. The vast majority of the papyrus is concerned with trauma and surgery, with short sections on gynaecology and cosmetics on the verso. On the recto side, there are 48 cases of injury. Each case details the type of the injury, examination of the patient, diagnosis and prognosis, and treatment. The verso side consists of eight magic spells and five prescriptions. The spells of the verso side and two incidents in Case 8 and Case 9 are the exceptions to the practical nature of this medical text. Generic spells and incantations may have been used as a last resort in terminal cases.
Source:
U.S. National Library of Medicine - Turning the Pages Online
https://ceb.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/books.htm
Wiki - The Edwin Smith Papyrus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Smith_Papyrus
Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus
http://www.aldokkan.com/science/edwin_smith_surgical_papyrus.htm