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Ancient Foundations

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Ancient Foundations chapter 3 Ancient Foundations What is it that, when present in a body, makes it living? — A soul. plato, Phaedo (105c) ∵ In the last chapter I noted that material objects have added new insights to the various veins of deep history. These traces delineate earlier views of the body, the mind, art, and how cultures defined the territory. This chapter moves the focus to ancient history. A stimulating place from which to start thinking about the brain — because it was cross-culturally erroneous — is with the conclu- sion that the heart is the seat of perception, intellect, cognition, memory, and emotions. It was regarded as the spirit and soul of an individual. The Chinese, the Indians, the Egyptians, like many Biblical and early Greek thinkers, all elevated the heart over the brain. Phrases like “in my heart I know it’s right” still reflect this way of thinking. Ancient Egypt The Egyptians had no real conception of brain function, or of the primacy of the brain in cognition. Their belief that the brain was of lesser importance is evident in their practices and their art as well. We know, for example, that Egyptian embalmers carefully preserved the heart after death, whereas they typically removed and discarded the brain. Figure 6 vividly contextualizes the importance of the heart. Here we see the scribe Ani and his wife Tutu in the assemblage of gods. Anubis — a jackal headed god — is at the center. The ceremony is the weighing Ani’s heart against the feather of truth, observed by the goddesses Renenutet and Meshkenet, the god Shay, and Ani’s own Ba (the human-headed bird). Because the Egyptians believed that a person’s heart was a record of good and bad deeds, if the heart is lighter than the feather Ani will survive and continue into the next world. If it is heavier, a monster who is part- lion, part-hippopotamus and part-crocodile will devour him. Thoth, the god of truth (with an ibis head) is there to insure that the weighing is fair. At top are some of the gods who are acting as judges. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043��998_004 <UN> 34 chapter 3 Figure 6 Weighing of the heart by Osiris, god of the Egyptian Underworld, The Book of the Dead (c. 1275 bc). We also have evidence of sophisticated Egyptian medical practices in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus and the Ebers Papyrus, many of which relate to neurological conditions. Both texts date from about 1500–1700 bc, with the Smith Papyrus considered the older of the two. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus (Fig. 7) describes 48 cases of injuries, fractures, wounds, dislocations, and tumors. The Ebers provides 800 simple or compound prescriptions from at least 40 different sources for various diseases and disorders. It is thought that both are based on considerably older and now lost writings, as well as informa- tion passed down orally from generation to generation. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus is the first empirical text known that refer- ences a part of the brain, in this case the cortex. Widely regarded as the earliest attempt to understand connections between the brain and the human body, this document sharply disputes the idea that ancient medical approaches were based solely on myth and superstition. The question is where we draw the line. While it seems the Egyptians developed some appreciation for the signifi- cance of the brain even before the weighing of the feather ceremony pictured above, medical knowledge of the central nervous system was rudimentary at best (Finger 1994). The Smith papyrus also serves as a reminder that although earlier cultures knew something about how the brain worked, they also knew significantly less than what (little) we know today. Their probing into brain trauma nonetheless does offer a sense that people were closely examining life and nature. The Ebers Papyrus, for example, mentions an electric catfish salve <UN>.
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