History of beliefs about the human body much on discourse about bodies, rather than on material bodies themselves. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's 1965 "Rabelais and His World", they promoted a more materially orientated direction in the history of the body. The Ebers Papyrus is an Egyptian medical text and is the oldest known record of the human body, dating back to 3000 BC. The Ebers Papyrus describes the body by physical examination and what can be felt. Clinical investigations such as the Pulse, percussion of the body, the recognition of diseased or disordered states. “If thou examinst a swelling of the covering of his belly’s horns above
What Is History? of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today anthropology, sociology, etc, flourish. History is sick. But then our society too is sick". Carr deplored the rise of Structuralism. Carr wrote there was the structuralist approach, which Carr called a "horizontal" way of understanding history "which analyses a society in terms of the functional or structural inter-relation of its parts". Against it, there was what Carr called the "vertical" approach "which analyses it [society] in terms of where it has come from and where it is going". Through Carr