#and the wording in the medical papyri is not unambiguous

[rudjedet]

I'm on the tail end of physical therapy for a broken leg that required surgery. It made me wonder if there was anything interesting in Ancient Egyptian medicine that you'd read about treating broken bones.

Oh, certainly! Ancient Egyptian treatments for broken bones were very similar to our methods nowadays - that is, they splinted and immobilised fractures after reduction. The treatments for a broken jaw and a broken nose in the Edwin Smith Papyrus (the largest collection of surgical treatments among the medical papyri) are in fact the exact same a few millennia later. For a broken nose in particular, the physician put two rolls of linnen moistened with oil into the nasal passages to keep the shape of the nose intact after bandaging and during healing. Nowadays, we use vaseline gauze the same way.

There's an interesting case in the ESP where the practice of a closed reduction is actually described. This is case 35, a fracture of the clavicle:

You should prostrate him [on his back], [with] something folded which is in [between] his shoulder blades. You should spread out his two shoulders in order to stretch apart his two clavicles until that fracture falls into its place.

This is, again, a practice that has changed very little over time. Interestingly this case does also describe a splinting, but a splinting that seems incongruent with the actual type of fracture:

You should then make for him two splints of linen, and place them, one of them to the inside of his upper arm, and the other to the under site of his upper arm. You should bind it with imrw* and treat him afterwards with honey every day until he recovers.

That would have done very little to stabilise the clavicle. However, the next case, number 36, deals with a fracture of the humerus. This case first details a reduction, but that reduction is the exact same as the preceding one in case 35, just with the term for humerus substituted for the term for clavicle. A fractured humerus is normally set through the use of traction, and then splinted in the way described in case 35.

Nunn, among others including myself, is of the opinion that this is a scribal error where the splinting for case 36 was appended to case 35, and the reduction for case 36 was incorrectly copied from 35.

But overall, lots of evidence that nothing much changed about the setting and treatment of broken bones!

*We haven't been able to precisely determine the meaning of the ingredient imrw so far. As a term it's only found in the ESP and it is likely some type of mineral ingredient since it's written with the determinative for mineral substances. Nunn suggests it may be an equivalent of plaster of Paris used for splinting as we do nowadays, which would be supported with the phrase "you should bind it with imrw" in case 35. I don't agree with that, not only because "bind it with [x]" sees common use elsewhere for any number of poultices and bandaging in the medical papyri, but also because imrw is used in the treatment of other cases that don’t deal with fractures, such as case 15; a slashed cheek with damage to the zygomatic bone. The Grundriss der Medizin der Alten Ägypter simply lists it as "an unknown mineral substance". Brawanski wants to read it as an "astringent bandage" with the note that the determinative could be ambiguous, so he suggests a reading of a bandaging with metal shavings. Meltzer renders it as “alum(?)”, based on similarities to the Coptic term for alum. Personally, I think it's likeliest a mineral/metallic substance, one that possibly inhibits bacterial growth, akin to e.g. red ochre, and which was used in bandaging and poultices.

Good luck with the rest of the physical therapy and rehab! Surgery-requiring fractures are a nsw.t=f m pH.wy=s