The thousand-year-old mummy turned out to be a cancer patient...

In the early history of cancer, people hardly even knew that cancer existed. But its history is actually much longer than we thought...

Scientists once discovered a tumor on a dinosaur fossil that was 150 million years old, which means that it existed long before the birth of humans.

Cancer first appeared in recorded literature in the manuscripts of an ancient Egyptian physician in 2500 BC.

This manuscript records a case of a chest lump, which is actually what we call breast cancer today, so breast cancer became the first recorded cancer.

When talking about the treatment of this lump, the papyrus only wrote a short sentence: incurable.

The following torn and yellowed papyrus is filled with scribbled ancient Egyptian text. The scroll is currently believed to have been completed in the 17th century BC and its content is based on a manuscript from 2500 BC. The copyist (or of course, a hurried "plagiarist") not only wrote in a sloppy handwriting, but also had many loopholes, and often corrected it with red ink on the edge of the papyrus.

The earliest medical description of cancer is found in an Egyptian papyrus written in 2500 B.C.: "A swelling in the chest... as if a mass of linen was felt..." As for treatment, the ancient scribe wrote: "There is no cure."

The Smith Papyrus was translated into English in 1930 and is now generally accepted by scholars as a record of the teachings of Imhotep, the great founder of ancient Egyptian medicine who lived around 2625 B.C.

Archaeologists have discovered that Imhotep was not only one of the few important officials of commoner origin in the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, but also a leading figure in the booming Egyptian Renaissance movement at that time.

In addition, as the prime minister of Pharaoh Djoser, Imhotep's achievements also involved neurosurgery, architecture, astrology and astronomy. Even after the Greeks conquered Egypt, they worshipped Imhotep, a genius, as a god and deified him as the god of medicine, Asclepius.

However, the Smith Papyrus is unique in that its content is free from the shackles of myths and legends. In an era dominated by witchcraft, spells and magic, Imhotep used objective and fair words when describing fractures and spinal dislocations, as if he was writing a modern surgical textbook. The Smith Papyrus consists of 48 cases, covering hand fractures, skin abscesses and skull fractures. At that time, Imhotep had elevated these once supernatural phenomena to the category of diseases, and explained them from the aspects of anatomy, diagnosis, prognosis and summary.

It was because of this famous ancient Egyptian doctor who illuminated the way forward for future generations that cancer was first presented to the world as an independent disease.

Anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) wanted to find the source of black bile, a body fluid that causes cancer. Since Vesalius could not find black bile in his patients, he began to search for the true cause and treatment of cancer.

Although Imhotep did not characterize this raised mass (cold, hard, dense like a blood fruit, and lurking under the skin) as breast cancer, it is difficult to find such an apt description. Each case in the Smith Papyrus is accompanied by a concise treatment plan, even for palliative care, such as pouring milk into the external auditory canal of neurosurgery patients, applying plasters or ointments to wounds, or burning the wounds. However, Imhotep fell into an inexplicable silence when faced with the above cases. He only wrote a short sentence in the "Treatment" section: "Incurable."

When people were forced to accept this embarrassing reality, the disease of cancer seemed to disappear from the history of ancient medicine.

When we hear about cancer again, it has been more than 2,000 years since Imhotep lived, and the disease is still hidden in shameful silence. Around 440 BC, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus recorded the story of Atossa in his book "History".

According to his description, the Persian queen suddenly suffered from a rare disease. Atossa was not only the daughter of Cyrus, but also the wife of Darius. Darius inherited the brutal ruling style of the Achaemenid dynasty and expanded the empire to a vast area from Lydia in the Mediterranean to Babylon in the Persian Gulf. During the reign of Queen Atossa, she found a lump on her breast that was ulcerated and bleeding. The cause of the disease may be highly malignant inflammatory breast cancer (in inflammatory breast cancer, malignant cells invade the breast lymph glands, causing redness and swelling of the skin).

In fact, if Atossa gave the order, famous doctors from Babylon to Greece would flock to the palace to serve at her bedside. Instead, she was willing to put herself in a state of self-pity. Atossa wrapped herself in sheets, as if she wanted to escape from the troubles of the world. Although Darius's doctors tried to persuade her to accept treatment, they failed after several attempts. Finally, Atossa agreed to let a Greek slave named Demosides remove her tumor.

Medieval surgeons used primitive surgical procedures to treat cancer. Johannes Scultetus described a mastectomy that used fire, acid, and strapping.

Soon after the operation, Atossa mysteriously disappears from Herodotus’ account, and for him, Atossa’s story is little more than a minor episode in this monumental work of historiography.

Even though cancer is a disease that has been hidden for centuries, it has left its mark in ancient history. But Herodotus and Imhotep were only storytellers, and their work, like all stories of its kind, is subject to flaws and inconsistencies. The “cancer” they described in their writings may have been a real tumor, but it may also have been a generalization for an abscess, ulcer, wart, or mole. For every case of cancer that has been diagnosed in history, there is some evidence of the malignant tissue that has survived to this day.

If you want to experience the mystery of this ancient disease firsthand and get a close look at the past and present of cancer, then let us come to the remote southern plains of Peru and visit a thousand-year-old tomb accompanied by sandstorms.

This plain, located at the northern edge of the long, narrow Atacama Desert, is dotted with hundreds of cenotes (small, shallow pits dug into the clay layer) covered by neatly arranged rocks. Over the centuries, wild dogs, storms, and tomb robbers have uncovered these shallow graves, providing us with evidence of cancer's presence.

The tomb contained mummies of members of the Koribaya tribe. In 1990, a large tomb containing about 140 mummies caught the attention of Arthur Aufderheide. A pathologist by training, Aufderheide is a professor of paleopathology (the study of ancient specimens) at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Unlike Farber, who studied recently deceased patients, Aufderheide examined mummies found at archaeological sites. Aufderheide stored the human specimens in small sterile milk jars in a laboratory at the University of Minnesota, in a vaulted basement. His collection includes about 5,000 pieces of human tissue, numerous biopsy specimens, and hundreds of fragmented skeletons.

Aufderheide set up a makeshift dissection table at the site of the Koribaya tomb and spent several weeks performing autopsies on 140 mummies, eventually noting something unusual in one of the remains.

While examining the mummy (a young woman in her 30s) who was found in a shallow clay grave in a cross-legged meditation position, Aufderheide felt a hard "spherical mass" on the left upper limb.

The thin, fragile skin of this well-preserved mummy made the spicule-filled mass stand out, and there was no doubt that it was an osteosarcoma (a malignant bone tumor) that had been in the mummy's body for thousands of years.

Aufderheide speculated that the tumor had already penetrated the woman's skin before she died, and because even small bone tumors can cause incredible pain, he believed that the woman's ordeal was too painful to survive.

......

Although we have discovered very few cases of ancient cancer, the bone tumor on the female mummy is impressive. She must have wanted to understand the cause of the severe pain and the formation of the upper limb tumor. Whenever we see such tumors, we can't help but imagine, and humans are about to meet this demon in its infancy.

Humans have known about cancer and the fight against it for thousands of years; they have been trying to understand the clinical characteristics of this immortal disease and are eager to uncover the mysterious cloak of cancer pathogenesis. The ultimate goal is to find out: Can humans cure cancer in the future? Can we permanently eradicate this type of disease from the human body and society?

This article is excerpted from "Cancer: The King of All Diseases"

Author: [US] Siddhartha Mukherjee

Translator: Ma Xiangtao

Publication date: February 2022

Can cancer, a disease rooted in its own coding system, be eradicated in the future? Can humans ultimately win the battle against their own genetic mutations? This is a scientific question as well as a philosophical one. Perhaps we will always coexist with cancer, witnessing together the adaptability and tenacity of life.

END

Editor/Heart and Paper

Source: Tadpole Musical Notation