Healing and Hierarchy: Access to Medical Treatment in Ancient Egypt
Name of applicant
Sofie Schiødt
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
University of Copenhagen
Amount
DKK 1,934,210
Year
2025
Type of grant
Reintegration Fellowships
What?
The project presents the first-ever comprehensive study of healthcare access in ancient Egypt. I work from the hypothesis that the Egyptian medical texts reflect the therapeutic practice of a small, socioeconomic elite rather than the population as a whole. I aim to determine who had access to what kinds of treatments to better understand realities of illness and healing in the ancient past.
Why?
By determining the accessibility of healthcare in Egypt, we gain insight into a fundamental aspect of life in the ancient past. The sources bear witness to the life opportunities of people, which dictated how they lived and died. Moreover, the sources mirror core experiences of our own lives - coping with illness - and as such are relevant to how we encounter and shape such experiences today.
How?
I will examine textual, archaeological, and pictorial evidence to ascertain the accessibility of drugs in the medical texts and in turn determine how representative these texts are of Egyptian healing practices as a whole. To gain a holistic perspective of healing activities, I will analyze all non-medical texts (esp. letters) that record acts of healing and compare them to the medical texts.