Every doctor in the Western world takes the Hippocratic tradition as the founding moment of medicine. Hippocrates, the Greek physician of the 5th century BC, is credited as the father of medicine. What the tradition does not mention is that Hippocrates studied in Egypt, that the Egyptian medical tradition he encountered was already two thousand years old when he arrived, and that the man now recognised as the first physician in recorded history was not Greek at all.

Imhotep lived in Egypt around 2650 BC. He was a physician, architect, mathematician, astronomer and high priest. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, which dates to around 1600 BC but is believed to copy sources a thousand years older still, contains the earliest known systematic clinical observations in human history: case studies, diagnoses, treatments and prognoses written in a register that any modern clinician would recognise as medical reasoning. Rational, evidence based, anatomically precise. The Greeks who came after did not invent this tradition. They inherited it, translated it, and sent it back into the world under different names.

This talk explores what the African medical tradition, from Imhotep and the Per Ankh Houses of Life where medicine was practised from locally held archives, to the plant pharmacology encoded in West African and Central African oral and ritual traditions, to the community health frameworks embedded in Ubuntu philosophy, knew about the body, healing, and the relationship between individual health and collective wellbeing. And it asks what was lost when that tradition was dismissed as superstition, its practitioners discredited, its knowledge absorbed without credit into a Western canon that then declared Africa had no medical history worth speaking of.

This is not a talk about alternative medicine. It is a talk about the suppressed origins of the medicine we already practise, the knowledge systems that informed it, and the profound cost of erasing the intellectual lineage of an entire continent from the history of human healing. Chinenye Egbuna Ikwuemesi draws on her published work in African mythology and history, her research at the Afrodeities Institute and her forensic historiography methodology to bring this argument to life with rigour, warmth and considerable revelatory force.

Audiences leave with a completely revised understanding of where medicine came from, a new respect for African knowledge traditions, and very often a strong desire to know more.

SUITABLE FOR: Health professionals and continuing professional development events, medical schools and nursing colleges, wellbeing and holistic health organisations, history of medicine societies, general history societies, book clubs, Black History Month programming, diversity and inclusion events in healthcare settings.

LENGTH: 45 to 90 minutes with question and answer session. Category: Health. History of medicine, African history, Imhotep, ancient healing.