Hello there, and welcome to the first column of Oh Snap! With Matt! I was talked into doing this by a few staff members (Emerald and Kellie are the main culprits for you all to blame) due to my vast knowledge of many venomous animals and the huge reserve of untapped resources available to me. That and I love writing everything that I can get under my fingers.
What we’ll be dealing with in Oh Snap! is the marine animals, plants and diseases which will make you yell out when they sting you, bite you, cut you, or otherwise make your day slightly less wonderful. Of course, we will also learn about all the interesting things the rest of humanity gets up to with them, as you will discover we’ve come up with some rather interesting activities.
So where do I start here in my first column for the lovely Halibut Herald? I had a few ideas, but I kept on wanting to take them back further. And I did, so far in fact we’re all going to take one big step back about 3600 years or so.
Doing your math now, we’ll see we are in 1600 B.C. (that’s Before Christ my fellow BC inhabitants), the location is Egypt and all it’s pyramids, the sphinx, and often mocked dance moves, surround us.
Amongst these Wonders of the World people were still walking amongst the animals in their everyday lives. Some of these animals were rather defensive of their territory and would fight for it on occasion.
This lead to people, naturally, trying to cure these bites and stings. They may be ancient to us now, but Egyptians were well ahead of their time in a few ways, and would use their insightful minds to come up with the best medical advice they could muster and write it down for all to share in the knowledge.
This accumulation of knowledge culminated in what we now call the Hearst Medical Papyrus. This text no doubt eased the minds of many an Egyptian citizen, but now, 3600 years later, it sits at the University of California in Berkley in poor condition as a kind of novelty and useful tool to gain insight into their mindset.
What interests me, of course, is what did they do to try and treat these nasty nasty venomous stings and bites? What were the most common treatment options available to those who built the pyramids?
What they came up with was a bizarre concoction that was applied directly to the wound and held with a bandage, it consisted of; leek, garlic, onion juice, salt, bile (don’t ask me where they got it!) and incense. I’ll bet the incense was there to help mask the smell of all these vile things, coupled with the awful infection that would likely ensue causing all kinds of rotting smells.
So now, 3600 years later, here I am work treating these same problems as the Egyptians faced when humans still hadn’t quite mastered using iron. We’ve come a long way from there to here so I’m going to ask that anyone out there suffering from a bite of any kind to do this for me; if you’re sitting in the doctor’s office/first aid room with a painful wound from a bite or sting and you smell garlic, or onion juice………do yourself a favour and come find me instead.
Walk (very carefully) like an Egyptian,
Matt Yeoman
Photo Source @ Ancient Egypt Online
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