31.A Poorly Written Book

This is part of the book's dust cover:

'MEDICINE IN THE DAYS OF THE PHARAOHS'.

The French authors are Bruno Halioua, a dermatologist, and Bernard Ziskind, a cardiologist, both 'members of the French Society for the History of Medicine' - no qualifications for this membership are mentioned. The translator is M B DeBevoise.

Their research apparently started with an attempted explanation of the ten plagues of Egypt for their children during the Passover Seder. But most Biblical historians [except for the fundamentalist orthodox] now believe that the Exodus story is a myth - a fiction composed many centuries later to provide the Jews in Babylonian exile with a legitimate history. The ancient Egyptians kept no slaves except prisoners of war; and 600,000 Israelite did not escape en masse across Sinai to Canaan - which was under Egyptian control at the time anyway. And the volcanic eruption of Thera / Santorini does not fit the plagues' description either.

Furthermore, these authors clearly do not understand Biblical Hebrew, when they translate 'kinim' as mosquitos instead of lice, and plague as 'oth'. You can safely skip this chapter at the end of their book. The authors love to quote from old Fench authors' works, often without giving references. I call this sycophantic name dropping.

The text is not well organized. Each chapter starts with a fresh sequence of references. But in the list, the pages to which these references refer are not indicated at the tops. Footnotes would have been better.

Many important clinical and paleopathlogical findings are ignored - particularly the serological detection of Tb, leprosy and Bilharzia. And the two interesting cases of big toe prosthesis are not mentioned either. Nor is the image of gallstones shown. They do illustrate the limestone painting of a female acrobatic dancer but claim [without evidence] that she was a prostitute - and they ignore to mention her elongated limbs, probably due to arachnodactyly.

I'm not sure of the evidence, on which they base their description of spinal pathologies in embalmers as due to the need 'to lift corpses and to carry them up and down stairs'. Really??

The classical book on Ancient Egyptian Medicine is by John Nunn. This book is not remotely in the same class.