On a recent episode of Digging For The Truth ancient Egyptian medicine was briefly explored. First, raw meat was put onto a wound. (I don’t remember what it was supposed to do.) Next honey was put onto the wound. It was stated that honey is ‘sterile’ and would kill bacteria, and was hygroscopic so it would serve to reduce the medium in which bacteria can grow. Finally, garlic juice and lemon juice were put on the wound since they have antibacterial properties.
Honey is pretty darn effective on small wounds - I use it all the time. There’s not a lot of acceptably “good” studies been done on it, however. The small “not good” studies have been very positive, finding honey on surgical wounds to be superior to polyurethane film, amniotic membrane, potato peel and silver sulphadiazine (cite) I’m particularly interested in learning more about this Indian study of honey mixed with clarified butterfat.
Garlic: a pretty decent antibacterial due to the presence of allicin, one of the sulphur compounds that makes garlic stinky. (This is one reason why “odorless garlic capsules” are bunk. Odorless caps remove the center portion of the garlic bulb, which is needed for allicin synthesis. No stinky, no worky.) There are some good studies on the use of garlic internally as an antibacterial: this one on h.pylori and this one on e. colii, for example. There has been less research on it’s topical uses, although some small studies show it to be antimicrobial against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites (see: Murray MT. The healing power of herbs: the enlightened person’s guide to the wonders of medicinal plants. 2d ed. Rocklin, Calif.: Prima, 1995.) and it certainly has a long history of such use in many cultures. I myself use it for ear infections, along with onion juice, with great results.
Lemon juice: citric acid is antimicrobial (its main use as a food additive is to prevent spoilage), and lemon juice is high in citric acid - probably the highest natural source available to the Ancient Egyptians. It’s also a readily available liquid in which to soak your garlic.
Effective? no idea. Sounds yummy, though. If the patient dies, he is ready to pop in the oven.
Radio talk show cite follows. Proceed at your own peril. Some guy did a pilot study to debunk honey to cure the sores that diabetics get on their feet. His preliminary results were very positive and he is now starting a real study (double blind, big sample, blablablah)
Why someone would put sugar on a diabetic’s blood stream is beyond me, but it seems the results go strongly against intuition.
I would need a major cite before I believe you can absorb any significant amount of glucose or fructose from honey through a sore.
The one that is bothering me is raw meat. It seems dangerous and practically asking for a bacterial infection, but then again you would presume people actively practicing such things would notice that putting raw meat on an open wound tends to kill people in a few days. I can understand how it would sort-of make sense if you don’t know anything about physiology, but does it have any benefit and how dangerous is it in reality?
Could it be possible that the raw meat was intended to draw maggots? I have read that some early medical practices inculded the use of maggots which consume dead and decaying flesh while leaving the living tissue alone.
That wasn’t mentioned. Of course, they had no refrgeration so it couldn’t have been an ‘ice pack’ (although there would, I suspect, be some evaprative cooling). Out of habit, I deleted the show right after I watched it. I’d hoped to refer back to it for this thread. IIRC though, it was supposed to ‘draw’ something or other.
But aren’t some maggots good, because they remove dead flesh? I know there are types which burrow into living flesh, but I thought maggots were/are fairly widely used to remove dead tissue effectively.
Well, maybe not that the meat would attract maggots. For a long time, people thought that maggots and mold and the like sort of “grew” out of their hosts. (Wasn’t one of Pasteur’s first experiments designed to prove that they did not? Something about broth in beakers . . .) I don;t know if the ancient Egyptians believed this or not, but maybe if they did, they thought they were “planting” maggots in the wound by placing the meat there. (All supposition of course.)
This is a concept I’ve seen in early European medicine. One method I’ve heard of was strapping a dead pigeon to the wound. I’m not completely certain of it, but IIRC, the “drawing” you’re referring to was thought to be efficacious because the dead meat was more injured and would draw the poison from the wound like a sponge.
Dunno about baldness, but it was supposedly a pretty effective birth control when mixed with honey and inserted as a vaginal suppository. (I can think of several reasons why . . . .)
