e, the human being would fall into a fever, and so on. But, of
course, such mysterious evils as these would be met and combated by
equally mysterious processes; and so it was that the entire art of
medicine was closely linked with magical practices. It was not, indeed,
held, according to Maspero, that the magical spells of enemies were
the sole sources of human ailments, but one could never be sure to what
extent such spells entered into the affliction; and so closely were the
human activities associated in the mind of the Egyptian with one form or
another of occult influences that purely physical conditions were at a
discount. In the later times, at any rate, the physician was usually
a priest, and there was a close association between the material and
spiritual phases of therapeutics. Erman(4) tells us that the following
formula had to be recited at the preparation of all medicaments: "That
Isis might make free, make free. That Isis might make Horus free from
all evil that his brother Set had done to him when he slew his father,
Osiris. O Isis, great enchantress, free me, release me from all evil red
things, from the fever of the god, and the fever of the goddess, from
death and death from pain, and the pain which comes over me; as thou
hast freed, as thou hast released thy son Horus, whilst I enter into the
fire and come forth from the water," etc. Again, when the invalid took
the medicine, an incantation had to be said which began thus: "Come
remedy, come drive it out of my heart, out of these limbs strong in
magic power with the remedy." He adds: "There may have been a few
rationalists amongst the Egyptian doctors, for the number of magic
formulae varies much in the different books. The book that we
have specially taken for a foundation for this account of Egyptian
medicine--the great papyrus of the eighteenth dynasty edited by
Ebers(5)--contains, for instance, far fewer exorcisms than some later
writings with similar contents, probably because the doctor who compiled
this book of recipes from older sources had very little liking for
magic."

It must be understood, however--indeed, what has just been said implies
as much--that the physician by no means relied upon incantations alone;
on the contrary, he equipped himself with an astonishing variety of
medicaments. He had a particular fondness for what the modern physician
speaks of as a "shot-gun" prescription--one containing a great variety
of ingredients. Not only