杏吧原创

ANCIENT Egyptians, prompted by their unique approach to death, investigated matters that other cultures preferred to leave well hidden. With ritual disembowelling, defleshing and brain extraction part of all upper-class funerals, the only surprise is that they did not develop a greater understanding of the human body.

Instead, Egyptian doctors, believing there to be a direct pathway from the vagina to the mouth, struggled to diagnose female infertility by inserting an onion into the vagina and then sniffing the patient鈥檚 breath. Nevertheless, their skill was recognised worldwide. When the sister of the Hittite king needed fertility treatment she turned to Egypt. It was left to the blunt-talking Ramses II to point out that the doctors were unlikely to be successful, as she was almost 60 years old.

The abundance of well preserved Egyptian bodies, together with a handful of papyri on medical matters, allows us a better understanding of Egyptian medical techniques than we have of any of their contemporaries. The idea of a book written by medical experts (Halioua is a dermatologist, Ziskind a cardiologist) that aims to synthesise the state of current research for the lay reader is therefore a good one. But while the scientific aspects of the book cannot be faulted, the Egyptology is far less secure, and Medicine in the Days of the Pharaohs is plagued by a series of unfortunate errors and assumptions, some of which at least are amended in the endnotes.

The authors tell us they were inspired by the biblical story of the 10 plagues of Egypt. Unsurprisingly, their final section veers off to seek a logical explanation for a series of phenomena that, as they are unrecorded in Egyptian history, many scholars argue never actually happened.