Talking Pyramids

The KNH Centre at the Manchester University has created a new podcast featuring Dr Joyce Tyldesley, post doc research associate Jacqueline Campbell and final year PhD student Natalie McCreesh. In the video they discuss their work on pharmacy and hair.

Watch the documentary on Biomedical Egyptology:

Natalie McCreesh is doing her PhD on annalysing hair samples.

Jackie Campbell, who is a member of the team working on the ‘Pharmacy in Ancient Egypt’ project talks about the thirteen medical papyrii from ancient Egypt. These contain 2000 remedies and cover 39 different methods of preparation. The Kahun papyrus which deals mainly with gynaecological treatments contains 33 remedies and dates back to 1850 BC while the Ebers papyrus has 870 remedies including the use of senna and carob to treat diarrhoea and a plant called ammi to control athsma and angina.

It was long considered that many of the treatments contained in the medical papyrii were fanciful and based in religous superstition and had little or no merit. But the team’s findings show that many of these treatments are not only effective but are still used throughout the world today. Indeed, some of the ingredients used today in western medicines are synthetic replications of these ancient medicines.

Natalie McCreesh’s work on analysing hair samples from mummies reminded me of the controversial documentary “Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies” produced in the early 1990s. But that is the subject of my next post so stay tuned for that.

You are encouraged to promote the podcast to others. If enough people watch the podcast it will make it into the iTunes charts, and the Faculty will finance more podcasts.

Links:
You will need the iTunes player to watch the video: download iTunes.

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Tags: mummies, technology

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 10:35 am and is filed under News, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.