Our knowledge of Egyptian medicine is derived largely from the remarkable papyri dealing specially with this subject.  Of these, six or seven are of the first importance.  The most famous is that discovered by Ebers, dating from about 1500 B.C.  A superb document, one of the great treasures of the Leipzig Library, it is 20.23 metres long and 30 centimetres high and in a state of wonderful preservation.  Others are the Kahun, Berlin, Hearst and British Museum papyri.  All these have now been published—­the last three quite recently, edited by Wreszinski.(7) I show here a reproduction from which an idea may be had of these remarkable documents.  They are motley collections, filled with incantations, charms, magical formulae, symbols, prayers and prescriptions for all sorts of ailments.  One is impressed by the richness of the pharmacopoeia, and the high development which the art of pharmacy must have attained.  There were gargles, salves, snuffs, inhalations, suppositories, fumigations, enemata, poultices and plasters; and they knew the use of opium, hemlock, the copper salts, squills and castor oil.  Surgery was not very highly developed, but the knife and actual cautery were freely used.  Ophthalmic surgery was practiced by specialists, and there are many prescriptions in the papyri for ophthalmia.

One department of Egyptian medicine reached a high stage of development, vis., hygiene.  Cleanliness of the dwellings, of the cities and of the person was regulated by law, and the priests set a splendid example in their frequent ablutions, shaving of the entire body, and the spotless cleanliness of their clothing.  As Diodorus remarks, so evenly ordered was their whole manner of life that it was as if arranged by a learned physician rather than by a lawgiver.

Two world-wide modes of practice found their earliest illustration in ancient Egypt.  Magic, the first of these, represented the attitude of primitive man to nature, and really was his religion.  He had no idea of immutable laws, but regarded the world about him as changeable and fickle like himself, and “to make life go as he wished, he must be able to please and propitiate or to coerce these forces outside himself."(8)

     (8) L. Thorndike:  The Place of Magic in the Intellectual
     History of Europe, New York, 1905, p. 29.

The point of interest to us is that in the Pyramid Texts—­“the oldest chapter in human thinking preserved to us, the remotest reach in the intellectual history of man which we are now able to discern"(9)—­one of their six-fold contents relates to the practice of magic.  A deep belief existed as to its efficacy, particularly in guiding the dead, who were said to be glorious by reason of mouths equipped with the charms, prayers and ritual of the Pyramid Texts, armed with which alone could the soul escape the innumerable dangers and ordeals of the passage through another world.  Man has never lost his belief in the efficacy of magic, in