"Are you so sure of that?" cried the physician with some irritation,
"then give me the proof. Have you ever examined a heart, has any one
member of my profession done so? The hearts of criminals and prisoners
of war even are declared sacred from touch, and when we stand helpless by
a patient, and see our medicines work harm as often as good, why is it?
Only because we physicians are expected to work as blindly as an
astronomer, if he were required to look at the stars through a board.
At Heliopolis I entreated the great Urma Rahotep, the truly learned chief
of our craft, and who held me in esteem, to allow me to examine the heart
of a dead Amu; but he refused me, because the great Sechet leads virtuous
Semites also into the fields of the blessed.

[According to the inscription accompanying the famous
representations of the four nations (Egyptians, Semites, Libyans,
and Ethiopians) in the tomb of Seti I.]

And then followed all the old scruples: that to cut up the heart of a
beast even is sinful, because it also is the vehicle of a soul, perhaps a
condemned and miserable human soul, which before it can return to the
One, must undergo purification by passing through the bodies of animals.
I was not satisfied, and declared to him that my great-grandfather
Nebsecht, before he wrote his treatise on the heart, must certainly have
examined such an organ. Then he answered me that the divinity had
revealed to him what he had written, and therefore his work had been
accepted amongst the sacred writings of Toth,

[Called by the Greeks "Hermetic Books." The Papyrus Ebers is the
work called by Clemens of Alexandria "the Book of Remedies."]

which stood fast and unassailable as the laws of the world; he wished to