Can doctors of today ignore the development of medicine in the past, as if they were starting with a blank slate? Delving into the study of the written sources of ancient medicine and inquiring into the transmission of medical knowledge leads us to say no. Marie-Hélène Marganne, historian of medicine and a specialist in papyrology, tells us why.

In order to learn their craft, they did have access to Internet. No films, videos, photographs nor the printed page were at their disposal. The doctors of Antiquity lived thousands of light-years away from our practitioners, stumbling under the weight of means of communication and information. And yet, even today young doctors take their oaths by making reference to the teachings of the most famous doctor of ancient times, Hippocrate. Is this just an accident?

“The study of the written sources of medicine in Antiquity is far from useless, says Marie-Hélène Marganne, historian of medicine and papyrologist at the University of Liège, where she is the director of CEDOPAL (Centre de Documentation de Papyrologie Littéraire). In a forthcoming article (1) devoted to the contribution of papyrology in the transmission of medical knowledge in the Greco-Roman world, or in her Le livre médical dans le monde gréco-romain (published in 2004 by Cedopal-Editions de l’ULg), Marie-Hélène Marganne argues ceaselessly in favour of doctors studying the path of learning of their professional ancestors – if for no other reason than to reflect on it, to draw inspiration from it, and to find along that path valid reasons to reopen certain questions.

A world to discover

“Papyrology is a discipline that is growing,” says Marie-Hélène Marganne. "Of the 1.5 million fragments we possess only 84,000 that have been edited. Some of these texts are written in Egyptian, some in Latin or Arabic, the majority are in Greek. There are about 300 Greek papyri concerning medicine, what is left of the most ancient books that were the source of Western medicine. As regards form, material, arrangement and content, these are the only ‘witnesses’ that can give us an idea of the material form of teaching materials and medical information. Of course, they are tough problems in terms of Greek palaeography (the study of ancient manuscript writing). Most of these papyri were recovered in Egypt, where the dry climate was favourable to their preservation.”

During more than 3,000 years, before the first codex (a book with pages), the “books” on medicine were transmitted on papyrus rolls. The longest one concerning medicine and written in Greek is more than 3.5 metres long and the text is arranged in 39 written columns. It was found in Egypt during the 19th century and is now part of the collection at the British Library in London. This scroll, written at different time periods, is anonymous. It contains a series of opinions about diseases and their causes, offered by doctors whose names we know by other sources or in some cases not at all. “It is thought that most Greek texts written on scrolls have been lost, and the same is true for many of the treatises in codex form,” according to Marganne.

(1) La transmission du savoir médical dans le monde gréco-romain : l’apport de la papyrologie, to be published in F. Le Blay, Doctrinarum disciplina. La transmission des savoirs dans le monde hellénistique et romain, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes.