Shocking research: Egyptians had cancer surgery 4,300 years ago

The remains of an ancient Egyptian not only retain evidence of metastatic cancer but also traces of a shocking brain surgery.

A research team reanalyzed a skull in the Duckworth collection of Cambridge University (UK) and found traces of a large cancerous tumor in the brain and more than 30 metastatic lesions.

These lesions are surrounded by cuts, which are traces of an attempt to remove the cancer with surgery.

It is worth mentioning that this skull dates to around 2686-2345 BC!

The skull of an ancient Egyptian shows traces of surgery to try to treat metastatic lesions caused by cancer - (Photo: Tondini, Isidro, Camarós).

According to Live Science, archaeologists have long known that ancient Egyptian medicine understood cancer from a very early age, but they did not expect that they would have thought of treating this disease at such an ancient time.

To date, the oldest description of cancer dates from around 1600 BC , written on the Edwin Smith papyrus in Egypt.

The note, believed to be a copy of a medical note from centuries ago, describes several breast tumors but emphasizes that there is "no treatment" for them.

Relief depicting an ancient Egyptian doctor in the ancient city of Abydos - (Photo: ANCIENT ORIGINS).

According to the article published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Medicine, the new discovery is the oldest evidence of surgical intervention directly related to cancer.

"This is where modern medicine began" - said co-author Edgard Camarós Perez, a paleopathologist from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain).

The team also analyzed the skull of a woman who lived between 664 and 343 BC.

This 50-year-old female patient had one lesion suggestive of cancer and two other lesions caused by being impacted by a sharp object.

Traces show that ancient doctors treated female patients' injuries well, although apparently not cancer.

This shows that until that time their research to treat this disease had not achieved the expected results.

Dr Camarós Perez said the new findings showed that cancer was a 'frontier' in the medical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians , a disease for which they may have spent centuries experimenting but could not find a cure. successful treatment project.

Even so, with a disease that remains challenging even in modern times, what the Egyptians did centuries before Christ is absolutely admirable.

The research team hopes to search for more ancient evidence to find out when cancer was first understood by ancient medicine.

'If more than 4,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians were trying to understand cancer at a surgical level then we are absolutely convinced that this is just the next step of something that started thousands of years ago. last year' - Dr. Camarós Perez said.