in which an alveolar process was pierced to drain an abscess under the first molar. From the tombstone of Iry, chief physician to a pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty (2625-2475), we learn that he was also "palace eye physician" and "palace stomach bowel physician" and bore the titles "one understanding the internal fluids" and "guardian of the anus."(Nunn 19)
             The mainstream medical practitioner studied in a House of Life located at one of the major cult temples. There he would read treatises on topics ranging from wounds to gynecology. The medical students learned that a patient's pulse was associated with the heart-"it speaks out of the vessels of every limb"-but also that blood, along with breath, tears, mucus, urine, and seamen, circulated through the body in a network of interconnected channels.(Dersin 45) This discovery of the pulse was one of the great achievements of Egyptian medicine. It was called the "voice of the heart," and in one section, found in both the Ebers and Edwin Smith medical papyri, the physician is told where in the body this voice "speaks".(Mertz 241) Anatomical hieroglyphs showing human figures with internal organs of animals suggest that an Egyptian doctor's knowledge of anatomy did not come from embalmers, who never dissected bodies, but from studying the work of temple butchers who sacrificed cattle and other animals.(Dersin 45) The physicians could identify lesions of the head, fractures of the vertebrae and other comp
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