Babylonisch-assyrische Diagnostik.

• Author: Scurlock, Jo Ann
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Babylonisch-assyrische Diagnostik. By NILS P. HEESSEL. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 43. Munster: UGARIT-VERLAG, 2000. Pp. xii + 471, plates.

Ancient Mesopotamian medicine has long played third fiddle to Classical and Egyptian medicine. Much of the blame for this can be laid at the door of Montesquieu, who believed that human civilization declines in direct proportion to the distance eastward and southward from France, and whose influence lingers on, often unawares, in twentieth-century Orientalist disciplines. Whereas GrecoRoman and Egyptian texts have been thoroughly picked over and the most optimistic interpretations given to the bits of medicine contained in them, the thousand-odd ancient Mesopotamian medical texts remain largely unstudied, and when surveyed have often been interpreted as pessimistically as possible. Fortunately, this is beginning to change, as is evidenced by recent works by scholars such as J. Fincke and M. Hausperger. Their work has shown, and my own work is confirming, that Mesopotamian medicine was a sophisticated observation-based system, which should come as no surprise given that the preeminence of Mesopotamian astronomy in the ancient world is an already acknowledged fact. What is most needed is a complete and up-to-date edition of ancient Mesopotamian medical texts. Pride of place among those texts belongs to the Assyro-Babylonian diagnostic and prognostic handbook known as SA.GIG, which is the subject of N. Heessel's book.

The book under review is a fine piece of work carried out with great care (giving rise to only the few inevitable quibbles--see below). It is also thoroughly researched. What it does not do (and generally does not attempt to do) is to place the citations in a truly medical context. Since only part of the diagnostic and prognostic handbook could be edited here, since none of the descriptions of symptoms found in the therapeutic texts could be incorporated, and since no systematic study of Mesopotamian medicine has ever been published, trying to identify particular entries would have been hazardous in the extreme, and it was probably best under these circumstances to take a minimalist approach as Heessel has done. This study and others like it are an essential preliminary to the study of this much-neglected field.

The work consists of seven sections plus a bibliography, indices, copies of previously unpublished texts, and two photos. Section one is the introduction, properly speaking. Section two discusses the ancient catalogue listing the tablets of SA.GIG. (This catalogue is transliterated and translated on pp. 14-17.) The chapter then discusses the division of the series into subseries, the content of each subseries, and the ordering of entries within each tablet. It also contains two diagrams which give the Akkadian and German names for parts of the head and body.

Section three describes the entries in the diagnostic/prognostic handbook in a general way, along the lines of previous studies on the therapeutic texts. The reviewer has in press a book on ancient Mesopotamian diagnoses and prognoses, in which differences of opinion on this score are discussed. Only a few comments seem pertinent here. Heessel is quite right (p. 43) that the ancient Mesopotamian diagnostician (asipu) must have compiled case histories, although it would have been better to argue this point on the basis of the asipu's knowledge of the course of diseases (how long a patient had been sick judging from what symptoms he is displaying--p. 42)...