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One basic question regarding the relationship between Mesopotamian and Talmudic medicine is how much either rabbis or Babylonians knew about internal anatomy. It seems that neither rabbis nor Babylonian medics knew much about internal anatomy, since they had rather vague ideas about where organs were and their functions. The brain was called in both Akkadian and Aramaic by the same word which means ‘marrow’, nor did anyone in Babylonia seem to know that it was related to cognition; both Babylonians and rabbis considered the heart to be the seat of intellect, and the kidneys to be the seat of emotions. The word libbu/lbˀ for heart probably referred to almost any organ of the belly, nor did anyone know about circulation of the blood. The main reason for such vague knowledge of internal anatomy was that no one performed autopsies, presumably because of taboos against cutting open the human body. What is important here is that the rabbis shared the general level of knowledge of medicine which had been prevalent in Babylonia throughout the period when cuneiform was being read, and possessed no other knowledge from elsewhere that can be attested, such as from Greek medicine. Moreover, one should assume that a Babylonian Jewish doctor in the period would have studied the same medicine with the same curriculum as any other local doctor, and that there was no such thing as Jewish medicine.
Bibliography
| Geller 1999, 27-28 | 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/a0000971.php
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