Pepper as Medicine

Appears in
Pepper
Pepper

By Christine McFadden

Published 2008

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Pepper was certainly widely used in medicine and in embalming procedures. There are records of peppercorns being found in the nose and abdomen of Pharaoh Rameses II. His mummified and more-or-less intact body was unearthed in 1886 at a burial chamber near Thebes, one-time capital of ancient Egypt, where it had lain undisturbed for more than three thousand years. Pepper and other spices would have been used to cleanse the eviscerated body and prevent putrefaction.

Pepper was found in excavations in the Indus valley in northwest India, and is mentioned in ayurvedic medical texts written over three thousand years ago. It crops up in the works of that venerable pair, Hippocrates (ca.460–370 BC) and Theophrastus (370–ca.285 BC), ‘fathers’ of medicine and botany respectively. The philosopher Plato (ca.428-348 BC) declared pepper ‘small in quantity and great in virtue’.