Page:The Harveian oration 1904.djvu/31

IO THE HARVEIAN ORATION, 1904 hieroglyphic script of Egypt. In the Hermetic literature he is famed for his knowledge of astronomy or astrology; the Westcar papyrus describes him further as an alchemist and magi- cian. These powers were always associated with medicine, and even to-day in the popular view they are not entirely dissociated from it. What share I-em-hotep may have had in those early discoveries of the movement of the blood, to which I am about to advert, we do not know. It does, however, seem clear that either through the labours of I-em-hotep or of other priest physicians, the Egyptians had discovered certain elementary facts and knew as much as the Greeks, as much as we find in the Hippocratic writings, or in those of Aristotle and the later Alexandrian school, and the hypothesis seems a natural one that the know- ledge possessed by the Greeks was acquired from Egypt.

It is of some interest to note that these priests of I-em-hotep, themselves learned men, not only saw and prescribed daily for vast numbers of sick persons but also performed innumerable necropsies. They removed the heart, large blood-vessels, viscera, and brain from the bodies of deceased persons, also from the bodies of sacred animals, prior to embalmment; the heart was placed in a 1. Erman, Die Märchen des Papyrus Westcar, I, S 22