Evidence from a 4,000-year-old skull suggests ancient Egyptian doctors were handy enough to try surgically removing tumors from their patients.
Humans have been waging war against cancer longer than assumed, new research suggests. Scientists have discovered archaeological evidence that ancient Egyptians attempted to surgically remove cancerous lesions, pushing the practice back to over 4,000 years ago.
Previous research has found compelling evidence that medical practitioners in ancient Egypt accurately described certain types of cancer, even though a clear understanding of cancer and effective treatments did not appear until much later in the historical record. To better understand how the ailment was viewed in the region, scientists from Spain, the U.K. and Germany studied a pair of skulls stored at the University of Cambridge’s Duckworth Collection.
The skull and mandible of one specimen, known as 236, belonged to a man in his thirties, who is thought to have lived sometime between 2687 and 2345 BCE; the other skull, specimen E270, belonged to a woman over 50 who lived sometime between 663 and 343 BCE.
Using a microscope, the researchers found signs of large cancerous lesions in both skulls that had caused widespread tissue damage.
