By New York Post. An international team of researchers says it has found evidence of ancient Egyptians performing experimental treatments or medical explorations of human cancer more than 4,000 years ago.
“This is an extraordinary new perspective in our understanding of the history of medicine,” said Edgard Camarós, a paleopathologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain and lead author of the study, which was published Wednesday in the Frontiers in Medicine journal.
Photo credit: Tondini, Isidro, Camarós, 2024/Frontiers
Camarós’ team examined two human skulls from the University of Cambridge’s Duckworth Collection in the UK. The first, of a man 30 to 35 years old, dates back to between 2687 and 2345 BC. The second one, of a woman older than 50, is from 663 to 343 BC.
Researchers noted that the man had a tumor — they observed about 30 small round lesions scattered across his skull. The researchers were stunned to discover that someone had cut around the lesions, seemingly with a sharp object. . .
The Cancer History Project reports that the earliest description of human cancer dates back to Egypt from around 3000 BC. The Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 BC) is credited with first calling the disease cancer. (Read more from “Evidence of ‘Extraordinary’ Cancer Treatment Found in 4,000-Year-Old Egyptian Skull” HERE)
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Evidence of Surgical Tumor Removal in Ancient Egyptian Skull Is ‘Milestone in the History of Medicine’
By CNN. . .However, it’s unknown whether the healers tried to remove the tumors while the patient was still alive, or if the tumors were removed after death, for analysis, Camarós told CNN.
“If those cut marks were done with that person alive, we’re talking about some kind of treatment directly related to the cancer,” he said. But if the cut marks were made posthumously, “it means that this is a medical autopsy exploration in relation to that cancer.”
Either way, “it’s amazing to think that they performed a surgical intervention,” Camarós added. “But we cannot actually distinguish between a treatment and an autopsy.”
Medicine in ancient Egypt, documented extensively in medical texts such as the Ebers Papyrus and the Kahun Papyrus, was unquestionably sophisticated, and the new findings offer important, direct evidence of this knowledge, said Dr. Ibrahem Badr, an associate professor in the department of restoration and conservation of antiquities at Misr University for Science and Technology in Giza, Egypt.
“We can see that ancient Egyptian medicine was not solely based on herbal remedies like medicine in other ancient civilizations,” said Badr, who was not involved in the new research. “It directly relied on surgical practices.” (Read more from “Evidence of Surgical Tumor Removal in Ancient Egyptian Skull Is ‘Milestone in the History of Medicine’” HERE)
