Talmudic medical recipes (7)

Text
The text of the recipe in Gittin 68b:
“For blood of the head let him take cypress, myrtle, poplar, olive, grass and marsh grass (ḥylpy dymˀ) and he dries it. He should boil them together (or: equally) and should place 300 “cups” on one side of the head and 300 cups on the other side (of the head).”

The first symptom begins the series at the head, which is the common format to both Akkadian symptom lists in the Diagnostic Handbook as well as the treatise of Diagnosis in the Hippocratic corpus. Nevertheless, as a symptom ‘blood in the head’ is obtuse, since it is unclear what the condition might be. More common in Akkadian symptoms is fever of the head (or brain), perhaps to be related to Greek phrenitis ‘brain fever’, but nowhere is blood of the head attested either in Diagnostic Handbook or the Hippocratic treatise on Diagnosis. The closest Akkadian parallels occur in the Diagnostic Handbook 20: “if a man’s head contains fluid”. Cf. also 20.26 “if his head has convulsions” (šumma qaqqassu idammu, from Akkadian damû “to have convulsions”), which might suggest that the Talmudic text should be understood in the same way.

Each of the ingredients in the recipe has an Akkadian cognate. The plants cypress, tamarisk, and myrtle occur together within Akkadian recipes, although no exact duplicate to the Aramaic recipe can be adduced. Similarly, other Akkadian recipes refer to elpetu ‘grass’ and elpetu mê purki, ‘grass of stagnant water’, corresponding here to Aramaic ḥylpˀ and ḥylpy dymˀ. Ingredients in Akkadian recipes are regularly mixed ‘equally’ (malmališ), similar to the Aramaic terms bhdy hddy.

Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 68b
Diagnostic Handbook (Akkadian) 20

Bibliography

Mark Geller

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