A recent study of mummified remains and literature from ancient Egypt and Greece and earlier periods carried out at Manchester’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology and published in Nature Reviews Cancer suggests that cancer was a rarity in the ancient world. The study which involved the physical examination of hundreds of mummified remains, and a review of the medical literature of the day found almost no incidence of cancer. The study does include the first histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy. The disease rate has risen massively since the Industrial Revolution.
Professor Rosalie David, at the Faculty of Life Sciences, said: In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare. There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.”
She added: The important thing about our study is that it gives a historical perspective to this disease. We can make very clear statements on the cancer rates in societies because we have a full overview. We have looked at millennia, not one hundred years, and have masses of data.”
The data includes the first ever histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy by Professor Michael Zimmerman, a visiting Professor at the KNH Centre, who is based at the Villanova University in the US. He diagnosed rectal cancer in an unnamed mummy, an ‘ordinary’ person who had lived in the Dakhleh Oasis during the Ptolemaic period (200-400 CE).
Professor Zimmerman said: In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases. The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization”.
Professor David who was invited to present her paper to UK Cancer Czar Professor Mike Richards and other oncologists at this year’s UK Association of Cancer Registries and National Cancer Intelligence Network conference said: Where there are cases of cancer in ancient Egyptian remains, we are not sure what caused them. They did heat their homes with fires, which gave off smoke, and temples burned incense, but sometimes illnesses are just thrown up.”
She added: The ancient Egyptian data offers both physical and literary evidence, giving a unique opportunity to look at the diseases they had and the treatments they tried. They were the fathers of pharmacology so some treatments did work
They were very inventive and some treatments thought of as magical were genuine therapeutic remedies. For example, celery was used to treat rheumatism back then and is being investigated today. Their surgery and the binding of fractures were excellent because they knew their anatomy: there was no taboo on working with human bodies because of mummification. They were very hands on and it gave them a different mindset to working with bodies than the Greeks, who had to come to Alexandria to study medicine.”
She concluded: Yet again extensive ancient Egyptian data, along with other data from across the millennia, has given modern society a clear message cancer is man-made and something that we can and should address.”
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[...] Environmental Working Group As a recent study indicates pre-industrial cancer was extremely rare. Was Cancer Unknown in the Pre-Industrial World? ? Oncologist Any cancer rate that is higher than extremely rare is not normal and the cause is most often [...]