A mace crashing down into your skull is not the best way to start your day. The sound of the bones in your head crunching while an enemy soldier smashes you with a heavy metal ball can be particularly upsetting. Speaking difficulty, paralysis, coma, and death most probably will follow shortly afterward, either from direct injury to the brain or from the infections that may grow there in the coming days. Had this happened to you in medieval Europe, you would certainly die, or at least, become gravely brain damaged. Strangely enough, had this happened to you hundreds of years earlier in Ancient Egypt around the year 2000 BC, you would be attended to by a "swnw" (the Egyptian word for physician), who would know what to do. How was it that Egyptian doctors knew treatments, particularly for head injuries, that were since lost and not recovered for thousands of years? War by itself, doesn’t bring about medical innovations, though it does play a big part in doing so; it takes more than that. The Ancient Egyptian relationship between medical practice and war demonstrates how an almost never-ending series of battles can be a big part of the development of medical innovations. For a long while in Ancient Egypt, there was civil war between the Egyptian provinces (or "nomos") until 3200 BC, when one of the province leaders, by the name of Menses, unified the main northern and southern provinces and began the succession of Pharaohs. Under this succession, the Egyptian army became more and more sophisticated and organized.
It appears that most of the Egyptians' knowledge was based on battle experience. The most sophisticated treatments were regarding wounds. Among all of Ancient Egyptian physicians' medical discoveries, clearly the most advanced were their techniques dealing with severe skull fractures. A doctor would first carefully lift larger broken pieces of skull off of the brain, and then any small fragments would be brushed away and discarded. The larger pieces would be carefully replaced onto the brain, and a disinfectant made of warm wine and rose oil (they didn’t know it killed germs, because they did not yet understand the germ theory) was put against the outer membrane of the brain. At last, the patient’s head would be wrapped in bandages; eventually, many would heal. This, along with twenty-six other techniques for treating head injuries is described in the Smith’s Papyrus. Making it even more obvious that it was war that aided Egyptian physicians in working out how to deal with head injuries, one might be interested to known that Egyptian soldiers never wore helmets in battle (until after the Smith Papyrus was written)!!! This strongly indicates that war had a great impact on medical innovation. Doctors learned so much about head injuries primarily because they most often dealt with head injuries during battle! |
 
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by Tanya Marton, ©1999, tanya@mcatmaster.com
Much
is known from the hieroglyphics that have been found on Egyptian stone tablets, papyrus
paper, and tomb walls. In particular, archaeologists found the "Smith
Papyrus" (shown to the left), a document copied by a scribe in 1600 BC. It
holds descriptions of detailed medical techniques invented over the previous thousand
years that were discovered and used by Ancient Egyptian doctors. This document shows
that Ancient Egyptian medicine was surprisingly sophisticated and superior to the
yet-to-come medieval European medicine in many ways. Egyptian physicians knew how to
use fever and pulse to test someone’s state of health, diagnose and treat forty-eight
different surgical cases, as well as being able to shape casts to custom-fit broken
limbs. 
