[This is a long story, for the TL;DR scroll all the way down.]
So I’d never heard of this before, and I decided to see if I could find anything concrete about this. After some digging I found two papers from a seemingly legitimate source on this subject. These come from the Academia profile of one Rosalind Park M.A., B.Sc., who has authored a good deal of papers on astronomy in Greco-Roman Egypt. The one that’s most pertinent to this alleged use of live electric catfish in Egyptian medicine as pain treatment is “Ancient Egyptian Headaches: Ichthyo- or Electrotherapy?”
In her abstract she starts by saying that she’s going to speculate whether or not certain treatments in Egyptian medical papyri are to be taken as early forms of electrotherapy. She does this by comparing these treatments to later treatments in Greco-Roman times, looking at existing translations and suggesting possible new translations.
The treatment she gives in this paper is Ebers 250:
My translation of this treatment is as follows:
Another [remedy] for illnesses in the side of the head: head of catfish fried in oil, apply to the side of the head for four days.
The most important words for this discussion are nar, catfish, snwx, to boil/to burn/to fry, and Hr mrHt, in oil.
Ebers 250 is a remedy for disease(s) in the side of the head, which Park takes to be migraine. That’s a reasonable assumption, considering “side of the head” is specificied here. However, she finds it highly improbable that the Egyptian physician would sit down and fry up an entire head of catfish as a treatment. Instead, she suggests that the translation should be read differently.
Her argument is that snwx should not be read as a verb, “fried”, but rather as an adjective, “frying”. Though she does say that we can only make guesses as to how the Egyptians viewed the concept of nature’s electricity, she then states that snwx might be “the best-fit technical word the Egyptians could come up with for the related concepts of ‘electrophysiology’.” (2007: 4) Her reasoning behind seems to in part hinge on the Arabic word ra’ad, which fishermen nowadays use to describe this fish, and which means “thunderstorm” or “lightning”, and that a different electrically charged fish native to Egypt is allegedly used as a hieroglyph in the word for “thunderstorm”, hAhAty, which I am unable to locate.
Park then goes on to suggest the following amended translation and rewording:
Head of the frying-Narfish (or the fish which causes ‘to fry’) applied to the migraine sufferer’s head (once every) 4 days.
In her view, the catfish needs to be alive and was to be applied to the head of the sick person in a form of proto-electrotherapy.
Straight off the bat there are two major problems with her translation and subsequent conclusion. The rewording is not the biggest issue - in general, it’s not frowned upon to take liberties with a translation in order to attain a more legible result, though I personally think in medical translations it’s for the best to stay as close to the source material as possible. However, in her reworded translation Park completely emits the words “in oil”, which make up half of the treatment, thus changing the entire contents of the remedy.
That’s a massive red flag. If I put “in oil” back in, while taking her interpretation of snwx as an adjective into account, I get this:
Another for illnesses in the side of the head: head of frying-catfish in oil, apply to the side of the head for four days.
That’s a lot more ambiguous still than her “reworded” translation with half the remedy missing.
The other glaring problem with this is the phrase “[snwx is] the best-fit technical word the Egyptians could come up with for the related concepts of ‘electrophysiology’.”
“Frying” to refer to the concept of electricity or electrophysiology is an English idiom, and there is absolutely no evidence the Egyptian language made use of a similar idiom. Park’s additional suggestion that we need to consider the words Arab fishermen use to describe this fish is extremely tenuous. I could accept the words “numbing” or “stinging” as a possible technical fit, but I need a hell of a lot more evidence to accept “frying”.
I reject Park’s conclusion that the verb snwx in Ebers 250 should be read as an adjective, and therefore points to the possible existence of a type of proto-electrotherapy. She claims her rewording is a “more lucid” interpretation of this remedy, citing that it seems improbable a physician would fry up a fish head to cure migraines. Considering that the Ebers Papyrus lists a remedy for trouble passing urine that requires cooking/frying a document in oil and rubbing the stomach with it for a number of days, it doesn’t sound all that improbable to me. I’m also very opposed to attempts at qualifying Egyptian remedies by terms such as “lucid”, because they bypass the Egyptian point of view and engage in modern bias.
I’m currently unable to find any remedies in the medical papyri that use live, electric catfish in an unambiguous manner that could be said to be a form of proto-electrotherapy. Greco-Roman sources do seem to be using live electric catfish, but Greco-Roman Egypt is a whole different ballgame from Egypt-5000-years-ago. There are recipies that involve catfish, but these specify a particular part of the catfish to be used. When a medical papyrus gives a part of an animal to use, they mean only that part. When they write “rub the balls of a black ass against the belly”, they certainly don’t mean “lift up the entire live donkey and hold him dick-first against the patient”.
TL;DR: There is, to my knowledge, no evidence Pharaonic Egyptian physicians from 3000 BC onward used live electric catfish to treat afflictions such as migraine, gout or arthritis. There may be some evidence that Greco-Roman era physicians did use live electrically charged fish in their medicinal administrations, but this isn’t enough to indicate a one-on-one “they did it too” connection. And if you are going to suggest a new translation that fundamentally changes the content of a text, please remember to use all the important words.
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