Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/43

 and in their successful campaigns against Asiatic nations the Egyptians learned much about the use of these rarer remedies. The different forms in which the Egyptians administered their remedies included potions, electuaries, gums to be chewed but not swallowed, gargles, snuffs, inhalations, salves, plasters, poultices, injections, suppositories, clysters and fumigations. The physicians, in their practice, were subjected to very strict rules regarding the amount of the doses to be given and the manner of administering the different remedies, and consequently they received no encouragement to indulge in any individuality of action. The prescriptions were written in very much the same manner as are those of to-day; that is, they contained the fundamental or important drugs, certain accessory materials, and something which was intended merely to correct the unpleasant taste of the mixture. In comparison with those commonly written at a somewhat later period these ancient prescriptions were of a very simple character.

Up to the present time the researches of the archaeologists have thrown comparatively little light on the surgery of the ancient Egyptians. The facts already ascertained, however, are sufficient to warrant the statement that they had reached a degree of knowledge and skill in this department of medicine well in advance of that reached by any of their contemporaries. They performed the operations of circumcision and castration, and they removed tumors, and their eye surgeons were especially renowned for the work which they accomplished in their special department. Their skill in manufacturing surgical instruments is amply revealed in the specimens—instruments for cupping, knives, hooks, forceps of different kinds, metal sounds and probes, etc.—which have been dug up at the various sites of ancient ruins. They must also have possessed considerable manual skill, for without it they could not, in embalming a corpse, have removed the entire brain from the skull with a long hook, by way of the nasal passages, and at the same time have left the form of the face undisturbed.