"It is really excellent, tried and tested a million times": efficacy in the medical and magical texts of ancient Egypt

In modern medicine, clinical trials are conducted to ascertain the efficacy of drugs that have been created for the treatment of specific ailments. The resultant reports and scientific papers provide a commentary on their effectiveness. In an ancient Egyptian context, textual markers are used to annotate various remedies for effectiveness. These statements of efficacy occur either in introductory rubrics, colophons, or margins of the healing texts from pharaonic Egypt. However, only four percent of remedies bear these markers. It is perhaps due to their limited number that there is negligible scholarship devoted to the study of these endorsements; the small quantity gives the impression that they are insignificant. Indeed, less than half a page has been devoted to the topic of efficacy in landmark works on Egyptian medicine by Hermann Grapow and Wolfhart Westendorf, which supports this viewpoint. Yet, there must be some significance attached to these markers, at least for the scribes who composed or copied them. As such, this thesis will investigate what these markers were, how they were used, and why only a tiny proportion of the surviving healing texts received such attention.

In identifying those remedies that have annotations of efficacy, patterns of use emerged from the dataset for each location. It was also noted that very similar remedies do not bear the markings. Therefore, since a purely pharmaceutical approach will not account for the markers’ sporadic use, the study interrogates the connection between the choice and the location of the marker from a cognitive perspective, drawing on the theory that words frame concepts and vice versa. Were these markers the result of lived experience or part of a copying tradition, or both? The study also examines how these concepts were communicated to the practitioner and patient. Did these markers contribute to a placebo effect? Finally, a comparison of remedies with and without markers is undertaken to ascertain a possible distinction between them. Insights gained from such an analysis may contribute to the broader study of efficacy as a human judgement in the wider history of healing practices.