The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World

by Guido Majno

This journey to the beginnings of the physician's art brings to life the civilizations of the ancient world--Egypt of the Pharaohs, Greece at the time of Hippocrates, Rome under the Caesars, the India of Ashoka, and China as Mencius knew it. Probing the documents and artifacts of the ancient world with a scientist's mind and a detective's eye, Guido Majno pieces together the difficulties people faced in the effort to survive their injuries, as well as the odd, chilling, or inspiring ways in which they rose to the challenge. In asking whether the early healers might have benefited their patients, or only hastened their trip to the grave, Dr. Majno uncovered surprising answers by testing ancient prescriptions in a modern laboratory. Illustrated with hundreds of photographs, many in full color, and climaxing ten years of work, The Healing Hand is a spectacular recreation of man's attempts to conquer pain and disease.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medicine, Science, Medical, Research

600 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[Beth Cato · Rating 4 out of 5]

This absolutely fabulous book explores healing techniques in civilizations across the ancient world, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Arabia, China, India, Alexandra, and Rome and the works of Galen. There are photographs and illustrations throughout. This is not a mere overview for the general public, but a book written by a doctor, for doctors; so yes, some of the descriptions and pictures are a bit on the gory side. I appreciated Majno's emphasis on the showing the original text and how translations are made, and why translating can be rather precarious.

I have a first edition of the book and some of the wording is archaic (a few references to primitive peoples being civilized) but overall it's a surprisingly fast and pleasant read. This book is a must for authors who write about the ancient world.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, this one sets my personal record for "longest to finish even when really well written." I began this one in 1976, and picked it up again in March 2014 after stopping at page 140. I guess I got busy and put it aside.
This is a great book about ancient medical/surgical history, written in a very engaging style. He covers neolithic folks, Sumeria, Egypt, Greece, India, China, and Rome up to Galen.
Strongly recommended if you like history even a little bit.

[Lloyd Earickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

You’re writing a fantasy story, there’s a battle, and one of your characters is injured.  What happens next?  Does she get a bandage, stiches?  How are the stiches and bandages prepared?  What’s in the poultice?  Who is doing the healing, and what does the healer instruct?  Is there a prescribed diet?  Follow-up care?  What happens if and when the wound gets infected?  If you haven’t read Majno's masterpiece, and there’s no magic healing, I would hazard a guess that the details are a little vague.  The Healing Hand is the answer.  This was one of the most broadly interesting and specifically useful books I’ve read in a long time.

Medicine is not my field.  When I select papers from multidisciplinary journals like Science or Science Advances, I rarely choose ones from the medical sciences.  The terminology is too specific and far afield from my own jargon for me to make sense of most of them without significant additional investment, and the opportunity cost in terms of other papers I could be reading which are closer to my own field and which are most likely to be relevant to my own work means I leave most medical papers be.  Fortunately, The Healing Hand does not presume prior knowledge in medicine beyond some basic terminology such as is commonly picked up by the informed layperson.

Yet, it is certainly a medical book, and Majno is amongst the most dedicated nonfiction and history authors I’ve read.  In chapter after chapter, he discusses experiments he conducted explicitly for the book in order to empirically establish the efficacy (or lack thereof) of certain treatments from antiquity.  Nor is it enough for Majno to do his own medical investigations; he does his own translations, and not just from one language.  Working with Assyriologists, Egyptologists, and Hellenists, he works through making his own translations of certain medical terms from their native languages into English.  Indeed, I think The Healing Hand has better descriptions of the linguistics behind cuneiform and hieroglyphics than the translation notes for books explicitly translated from those languages.  Majno's polymath tendencies extend from linguistics, to hydraulics, to history, which is doubtless one of the reasons I found the book so enjoyable.  For all its small digressions, it never strays from its main purpose, presenting the history of man’s relationship with medicine, in particular the treatment of wounds, and that clarity contributes to the book’s success.

It progresses through the major civilizations of the ancient world, discussing their relationships and what makes each unique, engaging also in some cultural anthropology along the way.  Sumer, Egypt, Greece, India, China, and Rome are all addressed.  Indeed, the only critique I can think to leverage upon the book is that it suffers from an abrupt ending.  After discussing Roman medicine, and Galen in particular, the book just…ends.  Majno does assert that medicine subsequently entered a dark age in which little progress was made and much was forgotten for almost a thousand years – a reader might be skeptical of this claim after reading The Light Ages, which emphasizes that they weren’t really the Dark Ages – but the thorough research underpinning the rest of the book, including with references to how these treatments were, in some cases, passed down all the way to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (with varying degrees of efficacy), leaves me inclined to trust that Majno did the research to support his claim.

Doubtless, it would be too much to expect a single book to cover the entire history of medicine, anyway, but it would have been interesting to see a similar analysis done on at least one American ancient culture.  It would have been especially interesting if the author had done similar experiments regarding the efficacy of traditional American remedies, which have increased in prominence in recent years, though I’ve not been able to find much empirical data on them.  Considering the biodiversity bounty of the Amazon, this seems apt to be a fruitful area of potential research.

The Healing Hand is an interesting book in its own right, but it also serves exactly the purpose I wanted from it, which was to improve my understanding of ancient wound care for application to writing about historical periods and equivalent secondary world cultures and civilizations.  Absent magical healing, I had a vague awareness that wound care really isn’t captured well in fantasy and historical fiction, which is even more true than I would have imagined before reading the book.  This is another case of the assumptions we don’t realize we’re assuming coloring our view of what is reasonable and realistic.  A tourniquet to prevent hemorrhage, for instance, makes perfect sense and is so incredibly basic that we don’t even have to think about it, and might be inclined to assume that even the most primitive cultures would be able to tie a cord around a limb in order to stop bleeding…but this presupposes an understanding of blood flow which is not shared by many ancient cultures.  No less an intellectually flourishing civilization than the Greeks believed that air flows through arteries and did not conceptualize the idea of blood flowing at all until the hydrodynamic innovations of Alexandria.  They also believed that blood flowing out of the wound was a good thing (which it is in limited quantities…), balancing the humors.  The idea of balancing the four humors would pervade Western medicine for well over a thousand years, and China had its own equivalent conceptual framework.  If there is a moral to be drawn across the medicine of every ancient civilization, it is that every culture’s medical practices had serious flaws working alongside procedures and treatments which could be quite effective.

I could go on in praise of this book, but, instead, I will encourage you to go read it.  My only cautionary note (other than the abrupt ending) is that a few passages and images could be considered a little off-putting for those with a sensitive stomach.  The only one that bothered me was the description of how the ancient Greeks dealt with gangrene.  Perhaps the warning is unnecessary, since this is a medical text.  The Healing Hand is a fantastic piece of nonfiction which I think anyone could find interest in, but it should be required reading for anyone writing about wounds in a historical (or secondary world historical) context.

[Martin Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome pre-history of medicine, super interesting! Scholarly work with thorough references. Seems to have been cut off at the end meaning i wish he encompassed recent history of medicine as well but since science exploded i could see how that would be an encyclopedic work. This should be required premed reading.

[Stanley Loftness · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful and readable account of early medicine

[Julio A. Cervantes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend the book for anyone studying early medical practices. The author is clear in his use of terminology and provides excellent examples.

[Mantas Giga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book... It was usefull for my thesis about ancient medicine.

[Lenny Husen · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG, if you know anyone who loves Medical History, this is the book to buy him/her for a gift occasion.
I love this book.
I bought it in Residency and it has been a delight ever since. I can't claim to have read it all the way through, but I am listening to a lecture course on Ancient Greece and Rome and picked up The Healing Hand again and was immediately entranced. This is SO well-written and the photos are wonderful. Truly one of my favorite books.

[Kyle Holden · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book really gives instight to how people in the ancient world went about the business of healing. Written so that both expert and novice can understand. Great if you need to do research on the subject of ancient healing.

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an awesome book if you like reading about ancient medicinal practices.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

too specific to be a general study, the illustrations and absurd perceptions of the medical professions of the ancient age are riveting in both perverse and sad ways.