Cardiology (Ancient Egypt Edition)

Hello friends. Early humans saw that all life depended on the continuous pulsing of the heart, and therefore assigned the most fundamental elements of life to this organ. To the Egyptians, the heart was the seat of all love, thought, and emotion, and was necessary to keep the body and soul together after death, which is why the heart is the only organ we find intact in ancient mummies. Yet the Egyptians were far more than a bunch of ancient mystics. The Ebers Papyrus, a compendium of Egyptian medical knowledge from 1500BC, spends a great deal of time explaining some very real diseases of the heart, so let's take a look and see what we can decipher...


The Weighing of the Heart: A measure of worth in the afterlife

1. There is a warning in the papyrus: "If thou examinest a man for illness in his cardia and he has pains in his left arm, and in his breast and in one side of his cardia, it is death threatening him." The phenomenon of angina leading to left arm pain was well known, and it inspired them to name the left fourth finger the "heart finger" (Romans later had the idea to wear rings on it to symbolize marriage). Since atherosclerosis was a lot less common back then, can you name a cause of angina pectoris that is not due to coronary artery plaques?


A page from the Ebers Papyrus

2. They also described certain disorders of the cardiac conduction system: "When the heart is diseased, its work is imperfectly performed: the vessels proceeding from the heart become inactive, so that you cannot feel them … if the heart trembles, has little power and sinks, the disease is advanced and death is near." What do you think they are describing?

3. The scroll includes descriptions of over 700 medications. Most sound like nonsense, but perhaps a few of them had some benefit. If the heart was "weak due to old age" or suffered from "heart dancing", they would prescribe the bulb of the squill plant, which we now know contains a kind of natural glycoside. What variant of this chemical do we use today for these same problems and what does it do?


Squill Plant

4. The Egyptians were also familiar with aneurisms (for which it was advised "to treat it with a knife and burn it with a fire so that it bleeds not too much") as well as other anomalies of the great vessels. However, one modern study identified a mummy with a finding that the Egyptians likely did not diagnose (they never conducted autopsies). A scan showed its ribs having irregular notches along their edges. Which vessel abnormality would explain this?


Interdisciplinary Research

5. One last excerpt: A "Debility that has arisen in the heart... its arching out as far as the borders of the lung and liver. It happens there from to him that his vessels become deaf, having fallen down as a result of their heat.” Which chronic problem could they be describing? Hint: Egyptians were not foreign to alcohol consumption.


ANSWERS (highlight to see):
1. Coronary vessel spasm (Prinzmetal's angina or Cardiac syndrome X)
2. Likely ventricular tachycardia (no pulse, heart trembles)
3. Digitalis, it slows the beats per minute (gets rid of the dancing) and increases the force of each beat (reduces the weakness)
4. Coarctation of the aorta
5. Dilated cardiomyopathy (for one)