Out-of-Place Ancient Medicine—Why Were the Oldest Known Periods the More Advanced?
Report Topics:
- The Healing Arts in Early China
- Medical Wisdom in the Americas
- Out-of-Place Medicine in the Ancient World
Full Report:
William Harvey was the first Westerner to officially publish his “discovery” of the circulation of blood in 1628, even though other European and Arabic writings accurately described the phenomenon going back to the thirteenth century. Preceding them all, however, is the Chinese text The Yellow Emperor’s Manual of Corporeal Medicine, which in its written form dated to the second century B.C.E., but in its oral traditional form is thought to extend back to at least the second millennium B.C.E.
Not only did the ancient Chinese physicians recognize the movement of blood through the body, but also identified 28 different types of pulse originating with the pumping activity of the heart.
The Yellow Emperor’s Manual also describes how the functions of organs and the severity of pain and disease have their own circadian rhythms or “biological clocks,” activated by the movements of the sun and moon. The existence of such cycles was not begun to be even considered by Western medicine until the late twentieth century.
Very much tied in with internal biological rhythms is the Chinese practice of acupuncture, just now being slowly accepted in the West as a valuable healing tool, but which in the Orient dates back three thousand years, most likely even longer. Whole schools were devoted to its practice, and golden acupuncture needles were placed with honor in royal tombs. According to the classic text, Nei Ching, the ancient metal needles were originally made of splinters of stone, and are thought to have first been used long before metals made their appearance in prehistoric China.
Not until the end of the nineteenth century did Western medical practitioners become aware that such diseases as beriberi, scurvy, rickets and goiters were caused by deficiencies in the intake of foods containing certain vitamins. Yet for more than 2,400 years, the Chinese Court commissioned Imperial Dieticians to recommend various vitamin-rich dishes and culinary delicacies in order to promote energy balance and health for both the Emperor and his subjects. Such famed early physicians as Chang Chi, in his tome entitled The Systematic Treasury of Medicine, studied deficiency diseases in great detail and prescribed very specific foods for their cure—all of which have been confirmed by modern medical research.
As a good example of this, burnt extracts of sargassum seaweed were recommended for goiters. In the West, not until the thirteenth century was it found that seaweed does indeed help shrink goiters, because it contains a high amount of iodine, now known as a cure for thyroid glandular swelling. Not only did the Chinese anticipate this by nearly a thousand years, but they also knew of techniques for distinguishing between goiters and thyroid cancerous tumors.
The Chinese likewise possessed a precocious knowledge of sex and pituitary hormones, which they utilized for medicinal purposes. As early as the second century B.C.E., Taoist adepts knew how to extract various hormones from human urine and administered them in a crystalline form. In the West, it was not until 1927 that biochemical researchers discovered how urine contains androgens, oestrogens and gonadotrophines which can be applied toward male and female hormonal balancing, as well as enhance fertility and sexuality.
For well over three millennia, secret schools of Chinese scholars sought after biologically active materials inherent in the human body that could stimulate perfect health, even immortality. One of these schools, known as the Nei Tan, was composed of alchemists who sought the mysery of living forever through the transformation of bodily substances through various physiological techniques. There are dozens of Chinese alchemical manuscripts written in cryptic language which have yet to be fully translated and deciphered. A preliminary survey of these treatises suggests they contain important formulas and sophisticated healing techniques that could lead to whole new fields of investigation and experimentation.
Perhaps one day the Chinese hidden wisdom of attaining immortality will finally be revealed. And with it, the answer may also be discovered of what was the real source for this advanced knowledge.
Over the last three decades, Dr. Abner Weisman of the New York Medical College has been collecting more than 3,000 Precolumbian clay sculptures, all of which exclusively portray medical symptoms and surgical procedures. Not long ago the collection was placed on exhibit at the National Library of Medicine near Washington D.C. The sculptures came from Mexico and other parts of Latin America representing various New World cultures, with many of the figures dating back between 500 A.D. and 2000 B.C.E.
Dr. Weisman is of the opinion that their purpose was to be used by ancient physicians as teaching tools for students, to help them make diagnoses and show them correct surgical applications. The figurines are detailed enough to accurately show signs and symptoms of malnutrition, deformity, and a number of sicknesses, as well as techniques for amputation, ceasarian sections and trephining.
Similar sophisticated medical knowledge was depicted on ancient Andean pottery, particularly among the pre-Inca cultures of Chan Chan, Paracas, Nazca, Wari and Tiawanaku, all dating to within the first millennium. The portraits are complemented by the archaeological discovery made at several sites of surgical instruments made of obsidian, bronze and copper, as well as remains of cotton bandages and gauze.
Among the Chimus—who flourished on the northern coast of Peru—are beautifully carved wooden arms, legs and hands, used as artificial limbs. These indicate that skillful amputations had been performed, which in turn presupposes the practice of hygiene, anesthetics and an intimate knowledge of anatomy.
Chimu pottery, too, reveals surgical techniques. On one piece, an anesthetic is being administered to a patient being prepared for an abdominal incision. The recognized success of these prehistoric examples of surgery testify to scientific developments beyond the understanding of later, supposedly “cultured” civilizations.
Further clues can be gleaned by studying the Quechua and Aymaran languages of the Andiean central highlands and altiplano, which event today still have a rich vocabulary for describing both the symptoms and the clinical applications for a multitude of physical shortcomings. A lexicon being prepared by Peruvian linguist Gonzales Helguin is so far several volumes long.
Finally, evidence of advanced medical knowledge can be determined from the skeletons of the patients themselves. It would appear the Andeans were experts particularly in cranial surgery, for their recovery success rate, based on post-operation bone growth, was anywhere between 55 and 85 perent, depending on the culture, as compared with between 25 and 33 percent among nineteenth century European countries. As medical researcher Shawn S. Kern noted:
“Over a century of investigations, scientists have succeeded in discovering the medical motives and reconstructing many of the methods involved in this most daring kind of prehistoric surgery. But they have not yet accounted for the remarkable rate of recovery enjoyed among the trepanation patients in pre-Columbian Peru.”
The ancient Peruvians were known to use the tourniquet, forceps and scalpels of highly polished brass, and employed cocoa-based anesthetics. Medical historian Dr. Roy L. Moodie observed that the Peruvians also practiced successful amputations, excisions, bone transplants and cauterizations. This he noted presupposed a far better level of knowledge than what existed in Europe and America as late as the nineteenth century.
Father Cobo, a sixteenth century Spanish chronicler from Lima, wrote about the Inca population in his day: “They have more knowledge of wounds and sores, and had particular herbs to cure them They cured wounds and cut them in ways of great value.” Cobo also acknowledged that they had surgical skills far superior to those of the Conquistadors.
Modern Cuzco surgeon Dr. Sergio Quevedo has found evidence that Precolumbian physicians expertly employed ultra-thin metal wires as sutures and ligatures for closing off large blood vessels. In one case, a Peruvian mummy’s cranium contained six extremely fine gold wires that had helped heal a bone infection.
Other parts of the Americas also exhibited advanced healing wisdom. For the women of the Matto Grosso region of northern Brazil, powdered paraguayan weed is well known to greatly reduce fertility. This was mirrored in North America by Cherokee women chewing on the roots of the spotted cowbane plant, and Shoshone women imbibing tea made from stoneweed—both are proven effective for inducing temporary sterility.
Among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, the bark of the yocco vine is used as a stimulant, which today’s botanists have verified contains a high percentage of caffeine. Similarly, the fibers of guayusa, utilized by tribes in Ecuador, also have properties for providing energy and inducing vomiting. Among the neighboring pre-Inca cultures of Peru, for untold ages cocaine was recognized as an anesthetic which they employed in their surgical practices.
The New World was also the source of curare, which in its potent form brings about lethal paralysis, but when used medicinally is a muscle relaxant. Not until the nineteenth century was the active ingredient in curare discovered in Europe, and used as an anesthetic in surgery. For the major tribes of Brazil, diluted curare is still administered as a tea for reducing bleeding during childbirth, and for colic in young children. It also serves as a diuretic, a fever reducer, and when applied externally, helps heal bruises and treats fungal infections. Even though the Amazonian shamans have been actively curing their peoples with curare and its derivatives over many millennia, modern research has confirmed the success of all of these usages only within the last one hundred years.
Researchers and authors Richard Evans Schultes and Robert F. Raffauf have performed experiments with several rainforest plants in both South and Central America which contain alkaloid dimethyltryptamine, better known as DMT, a very effective hallucinogen that also has curative properties. What amazed the two researchers is that the DMT base is not activated unless with another separate plant substance that is a monoamine oxidaze inhibitor. Each plant by themselves is highly toxic and is so bitter it induces nausea, vomiting and diarrhea almost immediately. As Shultes observed:
“One wonders how peoples in primitive societies, with no knowledge of chemistry or physiology, even hit upon a solution to the activation of the alkaloid inhibitor. Pure experimentation? Perhaps not.”
He questions how the earliest tribal shamans, given the myriad plant choices at their disposal, could have chosen the exact right two purely by chance alone in order to achieve the desired results. The answer to the puzzle may be that the shamans were heirs to a vast storehouse of wisdom that had originated in another place and in another far distant time.
Going a step beyond, psychiatrist Dr. Rick Strassman has discovered that in the human body the lungs, the blood and in particular the pineal gland in the center of the brain manufactures its own natural DMT. What we are only now just becoming aware of is that the increased production of this endogenous form of DMT is the chemical vehicle which helps induce out-of-body and near-death experiences, as well as a wide variety of other mystical states.
It now appears that the early American shamans were likewise knowledgeable of a whole array of other botanical sources that specifically targeted the pineal gland’s stimulation and hyper-activation of natural DMT, as an important part of their spiritual practices.
Here we are entering into areas for which modern research has no precedence whatsoever, that is far beyond our present understanding. And again, the question remains, what was the source, the origin for such sophisticated information?
At times, the discoveries from the unknown past border on the bizarre. In the 1930’s, a collection of ancient fetishes obtained from the San Blas Chucinaque peoples of Central America was sent to London for examination and exhibit. Professor Sir Arthur Keith, a noted anthropologist, discovered that one of the fetishes was a perfectly preserved human male fetus. He judged that it had been removed after five or six months from the mother’s womb, by what must have been an extremely delicate form of surgery.
What amazed Sir Arthur was that, under the microscope, every detail—from the pores of the skin to the tiny hairs that would have become eyebrows—were clearly seen. Amazingly, as well, the fetus had not been dried, cured, smoked or chemically treated by any known preservation technique. As author Richard Garvin noted:
“Contrary to the living conditions and habits of the Chucinaque, such an ability to preserve this embryonic child displays a scientific knowledge far surpassing their technological ability.”
As if adding mystery upon mystery, it was also found that the fetus had a skull formation completely unknown to modern science. In other words, it does not correspond to any cranial type of natural origin. What caused this malformation? Was the fetus perhaps an experiment that failed? Did some unknown surgeon in antiquity somehow alter the growth of the child while it was still maturing inside the mother? Perhaps one day—when our science has progressed to that level of sophistication—we will answer the mystery.
Various inscriptions taken from shrines along the Nile outline the use by the Egyptian physicians of a mold grown on still water, prescribed for wounds and infections. Helmuth M. Bottcher in his research on wonder drugs, demonstrated that the Egyptians possessed not only penicillin, but produced and utilized auremycin and terramycin as well. The ancient sources also showed that the early physicians understood the need for sterilization. They fumigated their operating rooms, and before making an incision, washed their hands thoroughly, and made sure knives were both washed and heated in a flame.
In the third century B.C.E., the Greek herbalist Theophrastus listed several ingredients that could be used for relieving inflammation caused by wounds. Among these, oil of cinnamon has been proven by modern research to be a very effective germicide.
A Sumerian clay tablet dating to about 3000 B.C.E. observed that, “when pain attacks the head, give kitbu and marru.” Both these substances were forms of fungus grown in preparations of decaying wheat and rye that produce ergot. Today, it has been found that ergotic alkaloids are a most effective drug in relieving migraine headaches.
The Egyptians consumed the root ami-majos before long journeys across the blistering deserts. The root, modern chemists found, contains 8-methoxypsorate, which increases skin pigmentation and helps lessen sunburn.
Various Egyptian medical papyri specified that willow bark was effective in curing headaches. Only within the last century has Western medicine discovered that willow bark is a source of analgesic and antipyretic salicylic acid, among the main ingredients in modern aspirin.
In the ancient Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, castor oil was recommended as a laxative and as a balm for sores and wounds—just as it is today. Eye ailments required the patient to eat heavy amounts of beef liver—rich in vitamin A, which helps improve eyesight. Goiters, caused by iodine deficiencies, were cured in the Papyrus with eating burnt sea sponge, containing high concentrations of iodine. Opium was administered as a pain killer—and some pain remedies today still have opium derivatives as a base.
As recorded in the Edwin Smith Papyrus, the ancient Egyptians understood that the heart pumps blood, that its circulation extends to every portion of the human anatomy, and that by listening to the pulse is an important key to the diagnosis of the health of the body being treated.
In 1889, a gynecological text was unearthed in northern Egypt, today known as the Kahun Papyrus, which dates back to circa 1550 B.C.E. It recommended as a contraceptive the placement in the vagina of an application of acacia gum, honey and sodium carbonate. At the time of the text’s discovery, the Victorian experts of the day declared this prescription as “obvious quackery.” But a modern re-assessment of its ingredients has been far more favorable. All three ingredients have been determined to be retardants of sperm mobility, while the acacia in particular contains lactic acid, a natural spermacide. Other given useful substances were olive oil and alum, another proven anti-sperm agent, the effects of which were rediscovered only in 1921.
Roman physicians of the first century—among them Dioscorides and Galen— were very knowledgeable of the use of at least a dozen plants as oral contraceptives, all of which have been proven to be effective within the last half century.
The Berlin Papyrus, from the thirteenth century B.C.E., asked for women, as a pregnancy test, to daily urinate on bags of wheat and barley. Not until 1927 was it demonstrated that the hormones in the urine of a pregnant woman accelerates cereal growth, while urine from a nonpregnant woman retards growth. The ancient Egyptians also observed that if the child was to be a boy, then the wheat grew faster, and if it was to become a girl, the barley showed signs of more rapid growth. Even though this process once proved successful time and again in determining the sex of an unborn baby, today modern science has yet to explain how this was accomplished, because we are unable to fully reproduce this process.
Other Egyptian prescriptions for head complaints used cypress grass and pepper, both of which have cardio-active agents. The physicians also successfully utilized aloes and castor oil as purgatives, figs and juniper as laxatives, acacia and wormwood as anti-parasitics, and dill, cumin, coriander and fennel as digestive remedies—just as they are found in most natural remedies today four millennia later. They also employed strict dosages of thorn apple, mandrake and poppy as sleep aids, plus sodium carbonate mixed with black and green mascara, acacia and red ochre for eye infections.
Phillipus von Hohenheim, who is better remembered by his Latin name, Paracelsus, was famed in the early sixteenth century for his use of strange alchemical mixtures in curing diseases. His writings reveal that he was well versed in ancient practices of hygiene and antisepsis, and was the first to record the causes and symptoms of syphilis, epilepsy and bronchitis.
Many of these he treated successfully with a powder he identified only as the “doctor’s ointment.” In a work entitled De Tinctura Physicorum, published posthumously in 1570, Paracelsus revealed the true source of the cure-all:
“This is the tincture by which some of the first physicians of Egypt and afterward up until our times have lived for one hundred and fifty years. The lives of many of them lasted for some centuries, as history clearly teaches, although this does not seem to be true to anybody; because its force is so miraculous, that it is able to enlighten the body and to strengthen him to such a degree that he will remain free of all diseases, and although afflicted by his old age, will appear as he had been in his youth. Therefore, the doctor’s ointment is a universal remedy which devours all sickness like a fire devours wood. Its quantity is tiny, but its force is mighty.”
Paracelsus died in 1541, and unfortunately the secret of the Egyptian drug died with him.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that several ancient cultures also understood the interaction of bacteria and antitoxins in the human body. In 1858, Livingston reported finding African peoples having practiced a form of vaccination for many centuries. This was confirmed earlier, in 1716, more than a century before vaccination came into being in Europe, for Cotton Mather of Boston learned how to inoculate against smallpox from one of his African slaves.
The Sanctya Grantham, a Vedic Hindu work compiled about 1500 B.C.E., gives instructions on smallpox vaccination in these words:
“Collect the fluid from the pustules (of infection) on the point of a sharp instrument; insert it into a man’s arm so that the fluid mixes with the man’s blood. A fever will follow, but the disease will be mild and create no complications.”
This text was first read in Europe before the Academie des Sciences in Paris in 1826—three years after the death of Edward Jenner, the supposed discoverer of the vaccination technique, nearly three and a half millennia after the Sanctya Grantham was written.
In another Sanskrit text known as the Samara Sutradhara we find mention of the use of two biological weapons in the forgotten past, each of which once produced its own deadly results. Samhura debilitated its victims by attacking the motor center of the brain, while Moha caused blockage of nerve impulses, resulting in complete paralysis.
Based on many written sources, the Egyptians also appear to have been at the forefront in the understanding and application of preventive medicine in immunology. The Greek historian Herodotus recorded that during large-scale building projects such as the construction of temples and pyramids, one of the greatest problems faced was the possible outbreak of epidemics among the workers. As a precaution, the Egyptian officials made sure that everyone ate large quantities of radishes, onions, garlic and leeks.
In 1947, two scientists isolated from radish seeds a substance called raphanin, found to be very effective in retarding the growth of several forms of microbes. A year later, Swiss researchers demonstrated that raphanin successfully combats several forms of contact-infectious bacteria including streptococci, staphylococci, pneumococci and bacillus coli. Traces of raphanin and other anti-bacteriological agents were also found present in onions and leeks.
In more recent years, garlic and onions have been discovered to contain allicin and allistatin, antibiotics effective against bacteria causing dysentery, typhus and cholera.
Over four and a half millennia before Louis Pasteur identified the existence of bacteria and ascribed to them the cause of many diseases, the great physician Imhotep possessed the same knowledge.. Egyptian legends handed down through the centuries tell how his wife, Apopi, was once stricken with trachoma, a bacterial eye infection that usually leads to blindness. The early physician applied a paste of green slate that contained anti-bacteriological ingredients. Apopi’s eyes festered and cleared, and she was able to see again. What is amazing, however, is that Imhotep identified the source of the infection as “tiny worms” so small they are “invisible to the eyes of men.”
Three millennia later, the Roman chronicler Varro, basing his findings on Egyptian sources, gave a similar assessment concerning the origins of air-borne sickness: “There are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float on the wind and enter the body through the mouth and nose, and there cause serious diseases.”
What mystifies the experts is that the most sophisticated healing knowledge appears first in Egypt’s earliest era, then declines significantly in later periods. It is as if the physicians at the very beginning of civilization along the Nile had inherited a high level of information and wisdom from an older unknown source, but were unable to improve upon it or even maintain it as time went by.
The same can also be said of surgical tools that were once used quite extensively. At the Temple of Kom Ombo in southern Egypt, wall engravings dating to 100 B.C.E. depict an impressive array of surgical instruments utilized at the time. Yet at Nauplion in Crete, the tool kit employed by a Minoan doctor was found going back to the fifteenth century B.C.E. that is not much different from its Egyptian counterpart portrayals, except for being even more diversified. What is more, the Minoan copper tools are virtually identical to the bronze and iron instruments from Greece used a thousand years later. Likewise, the first millennium B.C.E. Hindu medical work, the Sushruta Samhita, describes a very similar set of tools. Again, it appears a high standard of surgical skills was exercised from the dawn of the known ancient cultures, but that this original pristine wisdom was slowly lost and never surpassed or even regained.
Physician Dr. Charles S. Finch III, in his opinion concerning where this wide range of knowledge exhibited in the ancient cultures originated, made these important statements:
“As history dawns medicine is already at a very advanced state and it underwent a decline in later ages which was not reversed until the scientific breakthroughs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
“It is the conceit of modern historians that human culture has evolved in linear fashion from the simple to the complex. A more clear-sighted perception of history would show us that this flies in the face of the true facts; the progression of human civilization might be more accurately described as a sinusoidal wave, in which the ebb and flow of civilized progress is represented by peaks and valleys.
“From every pinnacle there is a regression and every succeeding civilization is faced with having to re-discover old truths. Many of the ‘marvels’ of the modern age are the fruit of recovering older ideas.”
Much of what the ancient physicians understood we can recognize today only because we ourselves have reached the same point in the development of our medical sciences. But did they also have access to healing wisdom that was beyond us?
In 2008, researchers at the University of Minnesota announced that they had successfully grown a fully functioning heart in a jar. Dr. Doris Taylor, Director of the University’s Center for Cardiovascular Repair, explained that she and her colleagues had first taken a mature rat’s heart and stripped it of most of its cells, leaving intact a “scaffolding” of connective tissue. They then placed the tissue in a small glass incubation chamber which they infused with nutrients, oxygen and fluids, along with living cardiac cells from newborn rats. The cells, using the tissue as its matrix, multiplied and together slowly grew into a beating heart. Dr. Taylor believes the technique will someday prove useful for growing human tissue, not only of hearts but also most any other organs, that could be employed for transplants when fully developed.
The potential image of hearts being grown outside the body in glass jars brings to mind the ancient Egyptian practice of placing certain body organs in what were called canopic jars durig the process of mummification. Could it be that the Pharaohs of old were actually attempting to preserve the tissue matrixes for their own organs, with the possibility of their “resurrection” at some future time?
Going a step beyond, the Egyptians also believed that both the heart and the brain possessed their own “consciousness” or “soul” aspect, identified as the Ab and the Ka respectively. Along with the organ tissue matrix, do the removed organs from thousands of years ago still hold something of the mental and spiritual personalities of the people who were mummified? And did the ancient temple priests along the Nile preserve the keys for reviving both the organs and their consciousness, still kept in papyri lost to us today?
[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
