Ancient Egypt and the Edwin Smith Papyrus

The oldest known written description of the brain comes from an Egyptian surgical text copied around 1600 BCE — a practical trauma manual that noticed head injuries could paralyse the body.

The story of neuroscience in writing begins with an Egyptian scroll. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, named after the American dealer who bought it in Luxor in 1862, is a copy made around 1600 BCE of a text that may be centuries older. It was translated in full by the Egyptologist James Henry Breasted in 1930.

A trauma manual

The papyrus is strikingly practical. It describes 48 cases of injury, starting at the head and working down the body. Each case gives an examination, a diagnosis and a verdict: an ailment "I will treat", "I will contend with", or "not to be treated". There is little magic in it — unusual for its time.

It contains the earliest known use of a word for the brain, describes the membranes around it (the meninges) and the fluid beneath them, and compares the convolutions of an exposed brain to the ripples on molten metal.

Noticing the brain controls the body

Most remarkably, the author connected injuries of the head and spine with effects elsewhere: a wound to the skull could leave a patient unable to use one side of the body, and a crushed neck vertebra could cause paralysis of the limbs and loss of bladder control. That is an observation of the nervous system's role thousands of years before anyone understood it.

The heart still ruled

Even so, the Egyptians — like many ancient peoples — believed the heart, not the brain, was the seat of thought and emotion. During mummification the heart was carefully preserved, while the brain was usually removed through the nose and discarded. The idea that the mind lives in the head would take another thousand years to win out.