Ebers Papyrus

The lore is actually pretty hard to nail down.

We're told that vervain was used ceremonially and medicinally in ancient Egypt, but there's no mention of it in the Ebers Papyrus.

which is the oldest document we have of ancient Egyptian medicine, and scant reference elsewhere.

The Ashkenazi Jews, from whom we get much knowledge of herbal medicine of ancient Egypt and Babylon, make no mention of it, at least in modern writings, and several authors say it was a favorite medicinal herb of Hippocrates, but I have found no evidence in his work to support that statement." So, we do know that it was used ceremonially in ancient Rome, but little is said of it by its medicinal use by most ancient writers.

Ancient Egyptians wrote about the importance of breath in their medical papyri, and they believed that the breath carried the life force, or ke, through the body during both waking and resting hours.

The Ebers Papyrus, dating to about 1550 BCE, includes remedies for breathing difficulties during rest, including herbal preparations meant to be inhaled before lying down.

Hippocrates, writing around 400 BCE in ancient Greece, observed that breathing changes during rest, and noted that certain positions seemed to promote easier breathing than others.

He also described a condition that sounds very much like what we now call disordered breathing during rest, noting that some patients who were very overweight had laboured breathing that could be dangerous.

The first recording of the diabetes condition was 1552 BC in ancient Egypt.

It's the Ebers Papyrus.

It's the oldest surviving medical text.

And it's translated a couple of different ways, but sort of the one more accepted is it's a prescription for someone who has sweet-smelling urine.

It actually appears sculpted in various Egyptian tombs.

And on the Ebers Papyrus, which was in 1500 BC, it is mentioned in there for its healing properties.

So this plant, I'm telling you, is so historically rich.

The Egyptians were using it and writing it down.

So it was one of the most popular plants used for medicine and also ritual purposes in Europe.

It is actually still used today.

It is also mentioned in the Ebers Papyrus from 1500 BC, and in the papyrus it is mentioned as being a painkiller and a sleep remedy.

But later on, in like the 1600s with Dioscorides, when he talked about it, he didn't mention it as a painkiller and a sleep remedy.

Historically, pharmacy was entirely reliant on crude observation.

If you look at the Ebers Papyrus from ancient Egypt around, uh, 1550 BC, it listed over 800 formulas.

Eight- eight hundred?

Yeah.

So I'm misremembering.

Also, another thing to note is that, so lots of people say, "Oh, the Papyrus Ebers," uh, there's this, this ancient Egyptian papyrus, mentions all of these diseases.

Mm.

And so, like, as I've been studying a variety of diseases for this project that I'm working on, you'll often hear about ancient Egyptian texts mentioning these diseases, but once you dig in, the reference to the disease is so vague-