Daughters of Isis(5)

Prescription for safeguarding a woman whose vagina is sore during movement: You shall ask her ‘What do you smell?’ If she tells you ‘I smell roasting’, then you shall know that it is nemsu symptoms from her vagina. You should act for her by fumigating her with whatever she smells as roasting.

Extract from the Kahun Medical Papyrus



Only one particular type of document offers us the opportunity to see the real Egyptian woman stripped of her modest veil of privacy. The so-called Medical Papyri11 – handbooks listing all the known symptoms and suggested cures for a variety of common ailments and accidents – combine with the details recorded from the surviving human burials and mummified remains to provide us with a fascinating insight into the daily life of the Egyptian doctor and his patients. This scientific evidence indicates that the average indigenous Egyptian woman was relatively short in stature with dark hair, dark eyes and a light brown skin. She had an average life expectancy of approximately forty years, assuming that she was able to survive her childhood and her frequent pregnancies.

The idyllic scenes which decorate many tomb walls give the impression that the Egyptians were a fit and healthy race untroubled by sickness. This impression is flatly contradicted by the medical evidence which indicates a population at the mercy of a wide variety of debilitating and life-threatening diseases ranging from leprosy and smallpox to spina bifida and polio. Even less serious-sounding afflictions such as diarrhoea, coughs and cuts could prove fatal without modern medicines, while the majority of the population suffered intermittently from painful rheumatoid joints and badly abscessed teeth. The 18th Dynasty Edwin Smith Papyrus paints a vivid picture of the dangers which could be encountered in a society where major building projects were conducted with only the most minimal of safety precautions and where warfare was relatively common. This papyrus, a specialized work dealing with the treatment of horrific industrial wounds, includes typical case histories: ‘Instructions concerning a gaping wound in his head smashing his skull’ or, more seriously, ‘Instructions concerning a gaping wound in his head penetrating to the bone, smashing his skull and rendering open the brain’. Not surprisingly, this latter was classed among the ailments ‘not to be treated’.

The reverse of the Edwin Smith Papyrus presents us with information more relevant to a study of women. At some time in the past an Egyptian scribe or doctor has used the back to jot down a curious assortment of magical texts and prescriptions for a variety of complaints. These include a ‘recipe for female troubles’, two prescriptions ‘for the complexion’ and one recipe ‘for some ailment of the anus and vicinity’. In their apparently random mixture of practical advice, scientific knowledge and superstitious ritual these prescriptions clearly indicate the thin line that always existed between ancient medicine and magic. Indeed, the Egyptian physicians did not attempt to differentiate between the effectiveness of rational scientific treatment and amuletic or supernatural cures, just as they did not distinguish between medical complaints and problems such as persistent dandruff and facial wrinkles which we would now regard as cases for a beautician rather than a doctor. Instead, they took the view that all people were born healthy, and that disease and infirmity, if not the direct result of an accident, were caused either by a parasitic worm or by an evil spirit entering the body. It therefore made sense to take practical measures to alleviate uncomfortable physical symptoms while relying on magical spells to banish the evil spirit and thereby cure or remove the illness.

The Ebers Medical Papyrus, also dating to the 18th Dynasty, is perhaps the most scientifically advanced of the Egyptian medical documents. It is less specific in its content than the Edwin Smith Papyrus, but shows the same mixture of sympathetic magic and good advice when dealing with more common Egyptian ailments, internal diseases and general afflictions such as baldness and bad breath. The section dealing with specific male problems is very short, detailing four particular illnesses (itching, priapism, impotence and gonorrhoea). The much longer section on women’s matters deals primarily with reproduction and associated problems such as contraception, breastfeeding and child welfare. Surprisingly, for a country whose funerary rites encouraged the dissection of the deceased, knowledge of the internal workings of the female body was fairly limited. Gynaecology was not a specialist subject, and there were some strange misunderstandings with regard to the function of the female organs. For example, although the position of the cervix was known, no mention is recorded of the ovaries, and the uterus itself was believed to be fully mobile and capable of floating freely within the female body. As a wandering womb was thought to cause the patient great harm, various means were developed to tempt the itinerant organ back to the pelvis, the most widely used being the fumigation of the unfortunate patient with dried human excrement.