The magazine Ancient Egypt has published the second part of Ira Rampil's study of pain relief in the ancient Nile valley, this time turning from herbal remedies to the physical and magical methods Egyptians used to ease suffering. The feature appears on The Past and follows an earlier instalment that surveyed herbal pain-killing preparations.
In the previous article, Rampil looked at the plant-based remedies recorded in Egyptian medical practice. This second part broadens the picture by considering the interventions that sat alongside those preparations. Where the first piece dealt with what a patient might take, this one addresses what might be done to the body directly and what might be invoked on the patient's behalf.
Ancient Egyptian medicine drew no firm line between the practical and the magical. Physicians and healers worked with treatments applied to the body as well as with spells, incantations and ritual acts intended to drive out the cause of pain. Rampil's article sets these two strands together, showing how physical and magical approaches were understood as complementary rather than competing responses to illness and injury.
The survey continues a theme that runs through much of what survives from Egyptian medical texts. Healing was a matter of both hands and words, and the practitioners who treated pain moved between the two without apparent contradiction. By pairing the physical with the magical, Rampil's account reflects the way the sources themselves present the subject, rather than imposing a modern division between medicine and belief.
Readers who wish to follow the full discussion can find the complete feature in the current issue of Ancient Egypt, with the article hosted on The Past. Taken together with the first part on herbal remedies, it offers a rounded view of how the ancient Egyptians tried to manage one of the most universal of human experiences.
Egyptian medical knowledge reaches us largely through papyri written in the hieratic script, a cursive form of the writing that underlies the monumental hieroglyphs. For those who would like to begin reading the signs themselves, the Hierolyte app teaches the hieroglyphic script step by step.