Ancient Egyptians may have tried to treat cancer with surgery more than 4,000 years ago, a study has found.
The findings, published in May in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, join a growing body of research seeking to better understand how one of the world’s most important civilizations attempted to deal with diseases, especially deadly ones like cancer.
Why is this discovery important?
Researchers have long known that ancient Egyptian medicine was more advanced than many other ancient civilizations, with some of the earliest records of physicians dating back to a time when procedures like bone setting and dental fillings were commonplace.
What scientists didn’t know until now was the extent to which doctors at the hospital had attempted to investigate and operate on cancerous tumors in the brain.
Scientists studying the skulls say they have found physical evidence of invasive procedures for brain tumors, proving doctors were trying to learn more about the disease we now call cancer. The find may also mark the first known instance of surgical treatment for the disease in ancient Egypt.
“In our study, we observed that they were performing tumor surgery by directly looking at human bones with cancerous lesions,” lead author Edgardo Camaros, a paleopathologist who studies ancient diseases at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, told Al Jazeera. “We don’t know if this was a potential surgical treatment or a medical exploratory dissection, but we know for sure that it was tumor surgery to better understand what we call cancer today.”
Along with Camaros, co-authors on the study were researchers Tatiana Tondini of the University of Tübingen in Germany and Alberto Isidro of the Sagrat Cor University Hospital in Spain.
How did scientists find evidence of ancient surgery?
The two skulls, each thousands of years old, provide evidence that both general treatment for head trauma and more specialised cancer surgery were practiced in ancient Egypt.
The skulls were originally discovered in Egypt in the mid-1800s and brought back by archaeologists for study, and are now part of the skull collection at the Duckworth Institute at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
In October 2022, new evidence emerged that the procedure had taken place using advanced techniques such as microscopic analysis and computed tomography (CT) imaging, which is typically used in medicine to create detailed internal images of the inside of the body.
Skull 236 is believed to belong to a man aged 30 to 35, and dates to between 2687 and 2345 BCE. Its scarred surface had one large lesion that appeared to be the result of a malignant tumor, and was dotted with about 30 smaller lesions. The researchers found cuts around the lesions, likely made with a sharp metal instrument.
“We wanted to learn about the role of cancer in the past, how prevalent this disease was in ancient times, and how ancient societies interacted with this pathology,” Tondini said in a statement. “When I first looked at the cuts under the microscope, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
The exact purpose of the incisions is unknown, as is whether the subjects were alive or dead at the time. Kamaros explained that if the incisions were made post-mortem, it could indicate that the doctors were conducting experiments or an autopsy.
It’s likely that the amputee would have tried to treat the patient if he or she were alive at the time, but without the patient’s medical history, it’s impossible to know for sure.
The second skull, dated 270, dates to between 664 and 343 BC and is believed to belong to a woman over 50 years old. This skull also has lesions that appear to be cancerous, but there are no signs of any attempt to treat or examine it.
However, skull 270 was able to heal fractures caused by severe weapon trauma and continue to survive for an extended period of time after the fractures occurred. The fact that this individual survived may indicate some form of successful medical treatment, although it is unknown what this may have been.
What else do we know about cancer in ancient Egypt?
Although the Ancient Egyptians believed that illness was punishment from the gods, they were still skilled in medicine, for example treating wounds with fresh meat, honey, lint, and many herbs. It is believed that there were enough physicians in Ancient Egypt that most doctors specialized in one disease.
As ancient texts already show, cancer likely wasn’t a disease they understood well enough to treat, but that’s not because it didn’t exist then: With so few cases of cancer in the fossil record, it was widely believed in the past that pollution and lifestyle and dietary changes in the modern world were the main causes of cancer, which is now the second leading cause of death worldwide.
But this latest discovery, like others in recent years, reveals that the cancer may have been more common in the past than once thought, the researchers said.
“Cancer is not a modern disease, but lifestyle and aging are important factors in increasing the incidence of cancer,” Kamaros said. “Because cancer is ancient and associated with multicellular organisms, humans have suffered from cancer since prehistoric times. It is important to consider that cancer was a much more prevalent disease than previously thought.”
In fact, the earliest cases of cancer are believed to have been recorded in an ancient Egyptian medical text now known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus. Though the word “cancer” is never used in the 3,600-year-old document, there is little doubt among scientists that the “serious and untreatable diseases” it describes are the same ones that scientists are still trying to understand and treat today.
Still, we know that the ancient Egyptians could diagnose cancer. They classified swellings by their appearance or by touch, such as breast tumors that contained pus or were reddish. Historians say tumors were also classified by how they felt, such as “hot” or “cold.”
According to the Edwin Smith Papyrus, ancient Egyptian physicians also sought to treat, if not cure, the disease through techniques such as cauterization (burning away unwanted growths) and bandaging with medicinal herbs to ease pain.
