Iirc you like/know about the AE medical papyri? I was listening to This Podcast Will Kill You's episode on toxoplasmosis and they said there may be evidence of it in the papyri, called aaa or something. Do you if they're right?
(cont) Or I think it was hookworm anemia, not toxoplasmosis
They’re right in that the aaa disease was at one point thought to describe schistosomiasis/hookworm anaemia, but it’s an oudated theory, for sure. When it comes to diagnosing backwards in time, we have to remember that certain pathogens we have today might not have existed in ancient Egyptian times, and certain pathogens that ancient Egyptians could have come into contact with can have gone extinct or lost their pathogenicity in the meantime. Other issues surrounding the interpretation of aaa as schistosomiasis lie in the realm of ambigious/unsure terms or terms we don’t have an unequivocal translation for.
aaa is mentioned 22 times in the Ebers papyrus. Unfortunately, there is no gloss that might give us a better idea of what we are dealing with, but it is clear that it’s both a well-known and a serious disease - even morbid.
There is only one instance in which aaa is connected to a possible parasite, in Ebers 62:
Another remedy, useful as something prepared for the belly: reeds (? sedge), 1; shames-plant, 1; grind fine, cook with honey, and eaten by a man in whose belly [there are] hereret-worms. It is the aaa which created them. Not killed by any [other] remedy.
The interpretation of aaa as schistosomiasis hinges on the interpretation of the hereret-worms as the adult worms of schistosomiasis. But as Ghalioungui (1987) pointed out, the schisosomiasis worms are small and disintegrate quickly after death of the host, and so it’s unlikely the Egyptians would have recognised these, let alone named them. As far as I know, we still have no clear idea which worms the hereret-worms are.
Another problem is the absence of a clear term for haematuria, the final symptom of schistosomiasis when no treatment is given. The word for urine (mewyt) and the word for blood (senef) are well-known, but they are not known to be used together in the Egyptian medical corpus to describe the urinating of blood. Elsewhere in Ebers we may have a description of something alike haematuria (Ebers 49: “Another [remedy] for driving out the voiding (wesesh) of much blood.”), but this description is not used in concurrence with the aaa disease. In fact, the aaa disease doesn’t at all seem connected to the bladder or urinating, when we would expect this if it was schistosomiasis. Instead, aaa disease seems to be far more connected to the heart (haty - the physical heart as opposed to ib, the seat of thought).
So that aaa would be schistosomiasis is almost certainly impossible, but we unfortunately don’t have an alternative diagnosis apart from a theory posited by Von Deines and Westendorf (1961) in their Wörterbuch der medizinischen Texte, namely that aaa is a poisonous substance, or poisonous semen deposited by a malignant entity. This seems to be supported by the fact that most remedies for aaa disease have to be taken at night, when such an entity would be active. But it remains conjecture!
Von Deines, H. & Westendorf, W. (1961): Wörterbuch der medizinische Texte
Ghalioungui, P. (1987): The Ebers Papyrus
Nunn, J. F. & Tapp, E. (1998): Tropical Diseases in Ancient Egypt
