Ancient Egyptian medicine : a bibliographical demonstration in the library of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, 12th January, 1893 / by James Finlayson.

  • James Finlayson
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ancient Egyptian medicine : a bibliographical demonstration in the library of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, 12th January, 1893 / by James Finlayson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    18/60 (page 16)
    The scribe wrote on papyrus with a reed, the hieroglyplis being generally traced in outline. He carried his inks in small hollows in his palette. The greater part of the ordinary inscriptions on papyrus are written with black ink, but directions for the repetition of certain passages, or rubrics, and the initial paragraphs are written in red. Texts written in other colours are found, but they are not common. Where it was possible the scribe represented an object in its natural colour; he made the sun red, the moon yellow, trees, plants, and all vegetables, green; but objects requiring out-of-the-way colours were not so well done, owing to the comparatively limited supply of colours at the disposal of the scribe. Reeds cut like modern pens were also used for writing, and specimens of these may be seen in the British Museum (North Gallery, Second Egyptian Room). The Ibis Mistaken for the God Thoth. Owing to this study of Egyptian monuments and the reading of their ancient papyri, we are enabled, although so many centuries later than Herodotus or Pliny, to understand Egyptian life and manners better than they did, and we can sometimes make out in what way their errors arose. A curious story is given by Pliny to account for the introduction of enemata into the practice of medicine in Egypt, ascribed by him to an imitation of a fabulous procedure of the bird named the ibis :—* The like device to this—namely, of clisters, we learned first of a fowle in the same Egypt, called ibis [or the blacke storke]. This bird having a crooked and hooked bill, useth it instead of a syringe or pipe to squirt water into that part, whereby it is most kinde and wholesome to avoid the doung and excrements of meat, and so purgeth and clenseth her body. M. Chabas, in a chapter entitled La Medecine des Anciens Egyptiens—Antiquite des Clysteres—Signes de la Grossesse, says:—t * Natural History, Book VIII, chap. 27, Holland's translation, London, 1634. + F. Cliabiis Mdlanges figyptologiques (l^'''^ sdrle), Paris, 1862, p. 66.