Talmudic medical recipes (8)

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The Babylonian Talmud in Shab. 110b gives the following recipe to treat a woman suffering from discharge (zbh): “take an ostrich egg and roast it, and wrap it in linen rags in summer and cotton rags in winter.” All terms in this recipe are calques from Akkadian recipes: per lurmi ‘ostrich egg’ appears frequently among materia medica, usually ground up into beer, used especially in kidney-disease recipes which also deal with ‘discharge’ (Akkadian muṣû); qalû ‘to roast’, occurs frequently both in Talmudic and and Akkadian recipe instructions, and the opposition between winter and summer is also known from Akkadian medicine. The reference to ‘wool rags in winter and cotton rags in summer’ also occurs in Git. 69b.

Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 69b
Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 110b

Bibliography

Mark Geller

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