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The author of the Hippocratic treatise Regimen in Acute Diseases, while commenting on ancient medicine, once refers to four basic ‘acute’ diseases - pleurisy, pneumonia, phrenitis and ardent fever. The four diseases are rather basic, two referring to lung conditions and two referring to conditions associated with fevers, similar to how Babylonian physicians might have categorised ‘acute’ diseases. In the Akkadian medical corpus, in therapeutic texts we find colophons grouping individual ailments into compositions under larger headings. One of them is ‘if a man’s brain contains heat (fever)’. There are two large tablets (BAM 480 and 482) and another text in the same series (BAM 494) deals with specific medical conditions affecting the head, including various skin ailments. The rubric seems to cover a wide range of symptoms associated with fever, including bloodshot eyes and clouded vision, as well as symptoms of ‘sunheat’, ašû-disease and raˀšānu-disease. Although fever can affect many other organs of the body, the association with the brain is suggestive, since Galen associates the disease of phrenitis, a combination mostly of fever and delirium, with the brain. Similarly, another large grouping of individual conditions under a major heading is a series known ‘Coughing’ (suālu), which combines recipes for many different types of thoracic illnesses, such as gall-bladder and even kidney problems, but all subsumed under the heading of ‘cough’, usually referring to a type of lung or respiratory complaint. The disease category suālu may correspond to the concept of ‘pneumonia’ (peripneumonia) in Hippocratic medicine, which also refers in general to lung complaints, less specifically than the modern related term. The Greek word, denoting a coughing disease is sialos, which might be etymologically related to Akkadian suālu, the only example of a possible Akkadian etymology for a Greek disease name.
Sources (list of abbreviations)
BAM 480
BAM 482
BAM 494
Bibliography
| Geller 2001-2002, 58 | Geller, Mark J. “West Meets East. Early Greek and Babylonian Diagnosis.” Archiv für Orientforschung 48/49 (2001-2002) 50-75. |
Links (external links will open in a new browser window)
Cf. Classifications of diseases (2)
Mark Geller
URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000996.php
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