An Egyptian medical text includes incantations for…

An Egyptian medical text includes incantations for specific illnesses as well as invocations to the gods, compiled from many sources and written about 1600 BCE.

This so-called Ebers papyrus also records careful case histories and valuable prescriptions, such as castor oil as a cathartic and tannic acid for burns.

Also commonly called Papyrus Ebers, it is one the two oldest preserved medical documents anywhere, the other main source being the Edwin Smith papyrus, written in hieratic around the seventeenth century BCE, but thought to be based on material from a thousand years earlier.