processes, and 20th century surgeons discovered remedies. Each
advancement (with its own sub-advancements) rested upon an earlier
breakthrough.
The first major foundation in the rise of medicine is, surprisingly, the
invention of the printing press. The printing revolution (called an “integral
part of the general history of civilization”^6 ), was a classic coming-together
of many technologies, but there awaited a major insight to make the
printing press a reality—and it’s not what you think.
Whatever environmental forces (ice ages?) necessitated the
strengthening of social bonds among our primitive ancestors, there was a
critical development of language and art that accelerated over the last
thirty thousand years. But it is only in the last five thousand years that the
written word has existed, which means that humans have spent 99.9
percent of our existence without writing. In the midst of the Renaissance,
before science was invented, the greatest handicap humanity faced in
conquering disease was the inability to share intellectual discoveries with
a broad group of scholars. Hand-copied manuscripts, written on papyrus,
were magnificently inefficient in conveying new information to
investigators in far-flung municipalities. For medicine to flourish, and for
surgery to become real, what was needed (to paraphrase Steve Jobs at the
introduction of the iPhone) was a breakthrough communications device.
Coinciding with the invention of writing—around 3000 B.C.E.—the
Egyptians made an ingenious utilitarian discovery for a ubiquitous plant:
papyrus. Prior to domesticated crop production, the wetlands were replete
with papyrus reeds—tufted three-sided emerald plants that held a peculiar
interior that would change their society for millennia. Papyrus was used
throughout the Mediterranean, but its production remained an Egyptian
monopoly, and other than the Dead Sea Scrolls, its relics have only ever
been discovered in Egypt.
The library at Alexandria was initiated by Ptolemy, the Macedonian
Greek who became the ruler of Egypt in the 3rd century B.C.E. Besides
being in a major cultural center and port, the library’s great advantage was
being close to the papyrus production centers. “Every ship that called in
the port of Alexandria was searched for [writing materials], and any that
were found were copied for the library. Ptolemy wanted works on any
subject, poetry or prose, and three centuries later, the library was the
repository of 700,000 scrolls.”^7