Egyptians performed cancer surgery 4,300 years ago

(NLDO) - The remains of an ancient Egyptian not only contained evidence of metastatic cancer but also traces of a shocking brain surgery.

A research team reanalyzed a skull in the Duckworth collection of Cambridge University (UK) and found traces of a large cancerous tumor in the brain along with more than 30 metastatic lesions.

These lesions are surrounded by surgical incisions, which are traces of an attempt to remove the cancer.

What is remarkable is that this skull dates back to around 2686-2345 BC!

The skull of an Egyptian man shows traces of surgery in an attempt to treat metastatic lesions caused by cancer - Photo: Tondini, Isidro, Camarós

According to Live Science, archaeologists have long known that ancient Egyptian medicine understood cancer very early, but they did not expect them to think of surgical treatment for this disease at such an ancient time.

To date, the oldest description of cancer dates from around 1600 BC, written on the Edwin Smith papyrus in Egypt.

The note, believed to be a copy of a centuries-old medical text, describes a number of breast tumours but stresses that there is “no treatment” for them.

Relief depicting an ancient Egyptian physician in the ancient city of Abydos - Photo: ANCIENT ORIGINS

According to the article published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Medicine, the new discovery is the oldest evidence of surgical intervention directly related to cancer.

“This is where modern medicine began,” says co-author Edgard Camarós Perez, a paleopathologist from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain).

The team also analyzed the skull of a woman who lived between 664 and 343 BC.

This 50-year-old female patient had one lesion suggestive of cancer and two other lesions caused by impact with a sharp object.

Traces show that ancient doctors treated female patients' injuries very well, although apparently not cancer.

This shows that up to that point their research into treating the disease had not been as successful as expected.

Dr Camarós Perez said the new findings suggest that cancer was a “frontier” in ancient Egyptian medical knowledge, a disease that they may have spent centuries experimenting with but had yet to find a successful treatment.

Still, for a disease that remains challenging even in modern times, what the Egyptians were able to do centuries before Christ is nothing short of admirable.

The team hopes to find more ancient evidence to learn how long cancer has been known in ancient medicine.

“If more than 4,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians were trying to understand cancer at the surgical level, then we are absolutely certain that this is just the next step of something that started thousands of years ago,” said Dr. Camarós Perez.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/soc-nguoi-ai-cap-phau-thuat-tri-ung-thu-tu-4300-nam-truoc-196240530091513341.htm