Even the ancient Egyptians had paid sick days

How state-supported health care worked in ancient times.

By Anne Austin

We might think of state-supported health care as an innovation of the 20th century, but it’s a much older tradition. In fact, texts from a village dating to Egypt’s New Kingdom period, about 3,100 to 3,600 years ago, suggest that ancient Egypt had a state-supported health-care network designed to ensure that workers making the king’s tomb were productive.

Health care boosted productivity on the royal tombs

The village of Deir el-Medina was built for the workmen who made the royal tombs during the New Kingdom (1550 to 1070 BCE). During this period, kings were buried in the Valley of the Kings in a series of rock-cut tombs, not the enormous pyramids of the past. The village was built close enough to the royal tomb to ensure that workers could hike there on a weekly basis.

These workmen were not what we normally picture when we think about the men who built and decorated ancient Egyptian royal tombs — they were highly skilled craftsmen. The workmen at Deir el-Medina were given a variety of amenities afforded only to those with the craftsmanship and knowledge necessary to work on something as important as the royal tomb.

The village was allotted extra support: The Egyptian state paid them monthly wages in the form of grain and provided them with housing and servants to assist with tasks such as washing laundry, grinding grain and porting water. Their families lived with them in the village, and wives and children could also benefit from these provisions from the state.

Ancient Egyptian remedies

Does modern medicine have anything to learn from the medicine of the ancient Egyptians, asks Mai Samih

The ancient Egyptians, who embalmed their deceased so carefully, must have had a profound knowledge of anatomy. This is shown in tomb reliefs depicting surgeons dealing with patients and in famous medical texts such as those in the ancient Egyptian Ebers and Edwin Smith papyri.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus who visited Egypt around 440 BCE wrote extensively of his observations of ancient Egyptian medical practices. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder also wrote favourably of them in his historical works. The ancient Greek fathers of medicine, Hippocrates, Herophilos, Erasistratus and later Galen, all studied at the temple of Amenhotep in Egypt and acknowledged the contributions of the ancient Egyptians to Greek medicine.

In his book Life of the Ancient Egyptians, author Eugen Strouhal quotes Herodotus describing Egyptian doctors by saying that “the practice of medicine is so divided among them that each physician treats one disease and no more. There are plenty of physicians everywhere; some are eye doctors, some deal with the heart, others with the teeth or the belly, and some with hidden maladies.”

Belgian Scholar Frans Jonckheere writes that there were 82 kinds of doctors known by name in ancient Egypt. No female nurses existed to help these doctors, but there were male nurses, dressers, masseurs, and lay therapists there for help. Czech physician Vincenc Strouhal wrote that the most advanced branch of medicine in ancient Egypt was surgery.