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Tractate Gittin 68a-70b of the Babylonian Talmud contains several pages of medical recipes, organised from head to foot, which is typical of medical textbooks of the period. Exceptionally, the lengthy text is not ascribed to any rabbinic authority, which suggests that the entire passage has been quoted from a contemporary medical text, and surprisingly, the Gittin passage contains many Akkadian loanwords. The layout of the recipes and descriptions of the symptoms is reminiscent of Babylonian medical texts, and the complete lack of Greek loanwords further suggests that the medical traditions recorded there originated in Babylonia. Like cuneiform medicine, there is no reference to surgery (or even venesection), and occasionally recipes are mixed with magical incantations, as was done in cuneiform medicine. Finally, the text includes references to Dreckapotheke such as types of animal dung which are prescribed in treatment, but the Talmud warns against using such ingredients since they could prove harmful. The redactors, who probably added the warnings about Dreckapotheke, had not known that originally in cuneiform medicine such references to animal dung were secret names for ordinary plants or minerals, and the secret names were designed to prevent laymen from trying to follow these recipes without the aid of medical advice.
Source (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 68a-70b
Bibliography
| Geller 1999, 28 | Geller, M. J. “The Babylonian Background to Talmudic Science.” European Association for Jewish Studies Newsletter 6 (1999) 27-31. [PDF] |
Mark Geller
URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000972.php
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