Gastrointestinal Disease And Its Treatment In Ancient Mesopotamia

Download or read book Gastrointestinal Disease and Its Treatment in Ancient Mesopotamia written by J. Cale Johnson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Babylonian medicine is the most important corpus of ancient medicine prior to the Greeks. This volume provides a comprehensive picture of how gasrtrointestinal illness, jaundice and related fevers, as well as diarrhea were treated in ancient Mesopotamia. The editions include transliterations, straightforward translations and essential commentary, and are divided into three main sections: the standard corpus for the treatment of gastrointestinal illness in Royal Library in Nineveh (otherwise known as the sualu subcorpus), the related group of texts that attribute intestinal disturbances to malevolent ghosts and a third group of texts focused on diarrhea. In addition to the standard compendia, isolated precursor texts, which were incorporated into these compendia, are included here in appendices. This volume provides an overarching picture of the entire field of gastrointestinal illnesses and related conditions in ancient Mesopotamia.

Download or read book Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine written by Jo Ann Scurlock and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To date, the pathbreaking medical contributions of the early Mesopotamians have been only vaguely understood. Due to the combined problems of an extinct language, gaps in the archeological record, the complexities of pharmacy and medicine, and the dispersion of ancient tablets throughout the museums of the world, it has been nearly impossible to get a clear and comprehensive view of what medicine was really like in ancient Mesopotamia. The collaboration of medical expert Burton R. Andersen and cuneiformist JoAnn Scurlock makes it finally possible to survey this collected corpus and discern magic from experimental medicine in Ashur, Babylon, and Nineveh. Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine is the first systematic study of all the available texts, which together reveal a level of medical knowledge not matched again until the nineteenth century A.D. Over the course of a millennium, these nations were able to develop tests, prepare drugs, and encourage public sanitation. Their careful observation and recording of data resulted in a description of symptoms so precise as to enable modern identification of numerous diseases and afflictions.

Download or read book The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine written by John Z Wee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine explores how analogy and metaphor illuminate and shape conceptions about the human body and disease, through 11 case studies from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.

Download or read book Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig written by John Z Wee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig is intended for specialists in cuneiform studies, and includes a cuneiform edition, English translation, and notes on medical lexicography for thirty Sa-gig commentary tablets and fragments, as well as a study on technical notations recurring in these commentaries. Within the Cuneiform Monographs series, this book represents a companion volume to Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2019).

Download or read book Perplexing Remedies in Ancient Medicine written by Maddalena Rumor and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-11-18 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topic of a potential relationship between Babylonian and Greco-Roman medicine has been discussed for a long time, yet it is notoriously difficult to give it flesh and bones by means of concrete examples. The main goal of this study is to identify real elements in the therapeutical traditions of the one system that can be connected to those of the other, which would confirm a certain degree of practical knowledge-sharing between the two cultures. By analyzing Dreckapotheke (filthy medicaments) and similarly perplexing medical ingredients, and by exploiting the concept of misunderstandings in translation, I show how elements of Assyro-Babylonian therapy were still present or emerging in the pharmaceutical compositions of the Early Roman Empire, ultimately supporting the idea of at least occasional transfers of medical knowledge between the two cultures. With its positive findings, this study contributes to a broader reconstruction of the context within which ancient medicine developed. It also finds reciprocal explanations of obscure passages and fuels further questions regarding the medical interrelations/interconnections between these neighboring ancient cultures.

Download or read book Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Text Catalogues written by Ulrike Steinert and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian medical, ritual and omen compendia and their complex history is still characterised by many difficulties, debates and gaps due to fragmentary or unpublished evidence. This book offers the first complete edition of the Assur Medical Catalogue, an 8th or 7th century BCE list of therapeutic texts, which forms a core witness for the serialisation of medical compendia in the 1st millennium BCE. The volume presents detailed analyses of this and several other related catalogues of omen series and rituals, constituting the corpora of divination and healing disciplines. The contributions discuss links between catalogues and textual sources, providing new insights into the development of compendia between serialization, standardization and diversity of local traditions. Though its a novel corpus-based approach, this volume revolutionizes the current understanding of Mesopotamian medical texts and the healing disciplines of "conjurer" and "physician". The research presented here allows one to identify core text corpora for these disciplines, as well as areas of exchange and borrowings between them.

Download or read book Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary written by John Z Wee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary is intended for historians of medicine and interpretation, and explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook. In line with commentators’ self-fashioning as experts of diverse disciplines, commentaries display intertextuality involving a variety of lexical, astronomical, religious, magic, and literary compositions, while employing patterns of argumentation that resist categorization within any single branch of knowledge. Commentators’ choices of topics and comments, however, sought to harmonize atypical language and ideas in the Handbook with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body in therapeutic recipes. Scholastic rhetoric—supposedly unfettered to any discipline—served in fact as a pretext for affirming current forms of medical knowledge.