The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus

In 1862 the American Egyptologist Edwin Smith, then living at Thebes, bought a medical papyrus in Egypt. It was a single scroll about 15 feet long with some loose fragments, written in hieratic, the cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphs, in about 1600 BCE. The text ran in 17 columns. After Smith died in 1906 his daughter gave it to the New York Historical Society, where it lay almost unnoticed for years until it was brought to the attention of James Henry Breasted of the University of Chicago.

The main text is a surgeon's manual of 48 cases of wounds and trauma. Every case follows the same plan: a description of the injury, a diagnosis, a prognosis and a treatment, with explanations that read like footnotes. The author repeatedly discusses injured men he had no hope of saving, out of interest in what could be observed. The papyrus also contains the first known written word for the brain.

The New York Academy of Medicine, which now holds it, notes that this rational approach is unusual among surviving Egyptian medical texts. The other side of the same papyrus carries magical spells and recipes, one of them for turning an old man into a youth.

Breasted published a facsimile, transliteration and translation in two volumes in 1930. At some point in the 19th century the roll had been cut into 10 leaves. The New York Historical lent it to the Brooklyn Museum in 1938, and in 1948 the two institutions gave it to the library of the New York Academy of Medicine. A new translation by James P. Allen, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, appeared in 2005.