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“It is unlikely that Herophile was unaware of all these ancient Egyptian achievements in the field of anatomy, proof of which was piled up in the temples of Memphis and other medical schools of ancient Egypt. According to Aristotle (384-322 BC), born in Stagira, Macedonia, it was ‘the heart which is the starting point of the vessels.’ Vessels, in other words, originate in the heart.”

“The vessels referred to, however, were only arteries at this point, not veins, because as far as blood circulation was concerned, the Greek philosopher was not more advanced than the ancient Egyptians. He too had only a partially accurate view of the process: ‘Blood, starting from the heart, flows into the vessels, thought it flows into the heart from nowhere else.’”

“Several times in his biological treatises, Aristotle discusses the supply of blood to the entire body from the heart serving as motor. Quite often, his description takes on the form of a metaphor in which the body is a garden irrigated from a single source. Water is carried to all parts from this singular source, through multitudinous channels leading ceaselessly in various directions. In the same manner, ‘the flow of the vessels extends, throughout the whole body.’”
“Oddly, though, Aristotle says nothing about the possibility of taking the pulse in various outlying parts of the body, as reflecting the beating of the heart, even though the Egyptians had taken clear note of the fact more than a thousand years before his birth. The fact that the ancient Egyptians were able to do this means that they had advanced beyond the strictly anatomical phase, and attained a higher level, that of clinical analysis. Logically and naturally, therefore, the attention of Egyptian doctors was drawn to the study of heart diseases. Paragraph 855 of the Papyrus Ebers, for example, deals with malfunctions of the heart, mentioning their impact on the liver and the lungs:

‘Regarding the weakness which attains the heart,
It is a tumor all the way to the lung and the liver
He (the patient) grows deaf, his vessels having collapsed.’

“In that situation, pulse beats can no longer be felt, ‘the vessels of the heart having grown mute’ (Eb., No. 855 c). In Section 191 of the Papyrus Ebers, a coronary syndrome accompanied by pain in one side of the chest spreading into an upper limb is mentioned. This complex of cardiac symptoms and signs suggests a heart attack. Naturally, the prognosis is terminal: ‘It is death which threatens him.’ This indicates that the pain of coronary failure had already been identified as a definite phenomenon in ancient Egypt, over 4,000 years before Heberden described it in the terms accepted by medical science today.”

Theophile Obenga
“African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period: 2780-330BC”
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