A History of Dentistry from the most Ancient Times until the end of the Eighteenth Century. Vincenzo Guerini
caste; but not all the members of this caste were doctors and priests at one and the same time; there was a special class among them, called “pastophori,” whose mission it was to cure the sick.
Our knowledge of medicine as practised among the Egyptians of old is now no longer limited to the scanty notices handed down to us by Greek and Roman writers. The researches made by students of Egyptian lore have placed original medical writings in our hands, now already partly interpreted, that permit us to form a sufficiently exact idea of the science of Medicine in ancient Egypt.
These valuable documents, denominated papyri, from the material on which they are written, now exist in great numbers in the Berlin Museum, in the British Museum, and in those of Leyden, Turin, Paris, and other cities; but the most important of the papyri treating of medical subjects is certainly the papyrus of Ebers, in the library of the Leipzig University.1 This very valuable papyrus—the most ancient of all known works on Medicine—is the best written of all the Egyptian medical papyri, and is also the best preserved and most voluminous. In size it is 30 centimeters high, 20 meters long, and the whole text is divided into 108 sections or pages, each one of about 20 to 22 lines. The celebrated Egyptian scholar, Prof. George Ebers, procured it, toward the beginning of the year 1873, from an inhabitant of Luxor, in Upper Egypt. He published a beautiful edition of it two years later in Leipzig; and in 1890 Dr. Heinrich Joachim published a German translation of the whole papyrus, with an introduction and explanatory notes.
The Ebers’ papyrus is written in hieratic characters. We here reproduce some passages of it, so as to give our readers an idea of the style of writing.2
Lepsius and with him the greater part of Egyptologists are of opinion that the Ebers’ papyrus is not an original work at all, but simply a copy of medical writings of still earlier date, belonging to different epochs, and which were collected and reunited to form a kind of manual on medicine.
Fig. 1
Part of Ebers’ papyrus in Egyptian hieratic characters containing three dental prescriptions..
From some indications existing in the papyrus itself, Ebers has been able to argue, with quasi certainty, that the papyrus was written toward the year 1550 B.C. But some parts of it have their origin in a far more remote epoch; they go back, that is, to thirty-seven centuries or more before the Christian era. In fact, at page ciii of the Ebers’ papyrus3 one reads:
“Beginning of the book about the treatment of the uxedu in all the members of a person, such as was found in a writing under the feet of the God Anubis, in the city of Letopolis; it was brought to His Majesty Usaphais, King of Upper and Lower Egypt.” Now, as Joachim remarks, the Usaphais herein named was the fifth king of the first Egyptian dynasty, and he reigned toward 3700 before the Christian era. Hence, it may be argued that some, at least, of the writings from which the Ebers’ papyrus was taken were composed in the very remote epoch to which we have just alluded, or perhaps still farther, for it is impossible to know whether the book, deposited by unknown hands at the foot of the statue of the God Anubis, had been written but a short time previous or at a much earlier epoch.
Fig. 2
Part of Ebers’ papyrus in Egyptian hieratic characters containing eleven dental prescriptions.
Dental and gingival maladies are in no way neglected in the Ebers’ papyrus. At page 72, a remedy is prescribed “against the throbbing of the bennut blister in the teeth,” then two other remedies “to cure the bennut blisters in the teeth and to strengthen the flesh (gum).”
It is somewhat difficult to say what is meant by bennut blisters; but perhaps it means small, gingival abscesses of dental origin. The first of the above remedies—probably meant to calm the pricking or throbbing pain that, in such cases, often accompanies the dental malady—consisted of:
| “Seps-grains | Part 1 |
| Dough | ” 1 |
| Honey | ” 1 |
| Oil | ” 1 |
| To be applied on the part as a plaster.” | |
The other two remedies, very likely intended for the cure of dental fistulæ, were to be used as masticatories. The first consists of:
| “Fennel seeds | Part 1 |
| Dough | ” 1 |
| Anest-plant | ” 1 |
| Honey | ” 1 |
| Incense | ” 1 |
| Water | ” 1” |
The other was still more complicated and thus compounded:
| “Dâm-plant | Part 1 |
| Anest-plant | ” 1 |
| Incense | ” 1 |
| Amaa-plant | ” 1 |
| Man-plant | ” 1 |
| Saffron | ” 1 |
| Aloe wood | ” 1 |
| Annek-plant | ” 1 |
| Cyperus | ” 1 |
| Onion | ” 1 |
| Water | ” 1” |
At page 89 of the papyrus4 we find two other remedies, having the same object, that is, “to cure the bennut blisters in the teeth and to strengthen the flesh.”
The first is compounded in this way:
| “Cow’s milk | Part 1 |
| Fresh dates | ” 1 |
| Uah corn | ” 1 |
| To be left stand and then to be masticated nine times.” | |
This is the second receipt:
| “Anest-plant | Part 1 |
| Dough | ” 1 |
| Green lead | ” 1 |
| Sebests5 |
” 1
|