by Angelina Moore

Created on: September 14, 2008   Last Updated: October 20, 2010

The way society uses medicine stems back to the ancient Egyptian period. The Egyptians were the first civilization to ever write down their findings, in which they used hieroglyphics. This enabled people to share their knowledge and help others stay to healthy. It also means that other civilizations can learn from the Egyptians to bring their ideas of medicine into the future.

The Egyptians' way of life helped develop their ideas of medicine. This can be seen by their religion. Their religion said that priests had to stay clean at all times. Most people in the Egyptian period looked up to the Egyptians and also stayed clean. They saw that the priests would wash every day and shave their bodies along with drinking water from clean bronze cups and so they followed suit. This means that there were fewer diseases being spread because people were keeping clean; the Egyptians were starting to get to grips with the concept of hygiene.

Also the Egyptians' religion said that people had to prepare dead bodies for their afterlife. The dead bodies had to be opened up for embalming ready for the afterlife. This meant that the Egyptians could start to understand the human body and where vital organs were placed within the body. It led them to learn about spices, ointments and even how to carry out basic surgery.

The Egyptian farmers irrigated their fields using water channels which led them to discover that when the water does not flow into the crops they die. Therefore there must be something in the body that flows throughout the body's channels and if the channels become blocked then the person will become ill. This is not such a silly idea as some of the remedies that they came up with to make someone better. It is actually quite true. Our heart pumps blood around the body and when the channels, which are the arteries, become blocked, the person can suffer from a heart attack!

Nowadays we have specialized doctors who are specifically trained to deal with problems in a particular area of the body. For example, if you have something wrong with your eyes you usually consult your eye doctor. However did you know that this idea of specialized doctors originates back to the Egyptian period? It was the pharaohs' idea. They were very rich and powerful and employed priests as specialist doctors to study specific areas of the human body and further their knowledge.

As the Egyptians advanced a lot in medicine they were also drawn back by their religion. It played a big part

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