Free The Egyptian by Mika Waltari Page A

Nahara, desiring that the miracle-working Ishtar of Niniveh be sent to heal him. But to the joy of the priests even foreign gods could not cure Pharaoh. When the river began to rise, the royal skull surgeon was summoned to the palace.
    In all the time I had been in the House of Life I had not once seen Ptahor, for trepanning was rare and during my training period I had not been allowed to attend the specialists at their treatments and operations. Now the old man was carried in haste from his villa to the House of Life, and I was careful to be at hand when he entered the purifying room. He was as bald as ever, his face had grown wrinkled, and his cheeks hung lugubriously on either side of his discontented old mouth. He recognized me, smiled and said, “Ah, is it you, Sinuhe? Have you come so far, son of Senmut?”
    He handed me a black wooden box in which he kept his instruments and bade me follow him. This was an unmerited honor that even a royal physician might have envied me, and I bore myself accordingly.
    “I must test the steadiness of my hand,” said Ptahor, “and open a skull or two here, to see how it goes.”
    His eyes were watery, and his hand trembled slightly. We went into a room in which lay incurables, paralytics, and those with head injuries. Ptahor examined a few and chose an old man for whom death would come as a release, also a strong slave who had lost his speech and the use of his limbs from a blow on the head in a street brawl. They were given narcotics to drink and were then taken to the operating theater and cleansed. Ptahor washed his own instruments and purified them in fire.
    My task was to shave the heads of both patients with the keenest of razors. Then the heads were cleaned and washed once more, the scalps massaged with a numbing salve, and Ptahor was ready for his work. First he made an incision in the scalp of the old man and pushed the edges back regardless of the copious flow of blood. Then with swift movements he bored a hole in the bared skull with a large tubular bore and lifted out the circle of bone. The old man began to groan, and his face turned blue.
    “I see nothing the matter with his head,” said Ptahor. He replaced the bit of bone, stitched the edges of the scalp together, and bandaged the head; whereupon the old man gave up the ghost.
    “My hands appear to tremble somewhat,” remarked Ptahor. “Perhaps one of the young men would bring me a cup of wine.”
    The onlookers, besides the teachers in the House of Life, consisted of all the students who were to become head surgeons. When Ptahor had had his wine, he turned his attention to the slave, who had been bound and drugged, yet still sat savagely glowering at us. Ptahor asked that he might be bound yet more firmly and that his head might be gripped in a vice that not even a giant could have shifted. He then opened up the scalp and this time was careful to stanch the flow of blood. The veins at the edges of the incision were cauterized and the blood stopped by special medicaments. Ptahor let other doctors do this, to spare his own hands. In the House of Life there was as a rule a “blood stancher,” a man of no education whose mere presence would stop a flow of blood in a short time, but Ptahor wished this to be a demonstration and desired also to save his strength for Pharaoh.
    When Ptahor had cleansed the outside of the skull, he pointed out to us the place where the bone had been crushed in. By means of bore, saw, and forceps he removed a piece of skull as large as the palm of one’s hand and then showed us how clotted blood had gathered among the white convolutions of the brain. With infinite care he removed the blood bit by bit and freed a bone splinter that had been forced into the brain substance. This operation took some time, so each pupil could follow his movements and impress the look of a brain upon his own memory. Next Ptahor closed the opening with a plate of silver that had been prepared meanwhile to