Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of The Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel.

• Author: Biggs, Robert D.

The phrase "illness and health care" was carefully chosen by Hector Avalos to avoid using the term "medicine" in his title. He is also careful in insisting on making a distinction between "disease" and "illness," as I have also for some years, though his definition (p. 27), taken from A. Kleinman, Patients and Healers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1980), 72 ("Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychosocial experience and meaning of perceived disease"), is more sophisticated than the distinction I tried to make (Biggs, "Medizin," Reallexikon der Assyriologie [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990], 7:626).

In my opinion, Avalos has very successfully applied to the ancient data some of the insights gained in recent years from medical anthropology. Citing Thomas Kuhn, he observes that advances in a field are rarely the products of new data, but of new questions and paradigms applied to data that already exist. His primary concern in this volume is the social consequences of illnesses, and even then, he chooses to focus on the role of temples in the health care system. He defines a health care system as a set of interacting resources, institutions, and strategies intended to prevent or cure illness in a particular community. He goes on to observe that most health care systems, modern or not, offer a variety of options for patients. But, as he says, what a system intends is not always what it yields, and cites the Asclepia which were meant to cure the sick but may have caused the spread of illness by concentrating large numbers of sick people in small places (though he does not cite it, the examples of childbirth in early modern hospitals is a telling parallel).

The author sets out to compare and contrast the roles of temples in three cultures, Greece, ancient Mesopotamia, and ancient Israel. In Greece he focuses, naturally, on the temples of Asclepius. Here, a very recent hook provides a new study of the ancient inscriptions: Lynn R. Lidonnici, The Epidaurian Miracle Inscriptions: Text, Translation and Commentary, SBL Texts and Translations, vol. 36; Graeco-Roman Religion, vol. 11 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995). His section on ancient Israel has a number of interesting observations, including that Yahweh was seen, not only as the "sender/controller" of an illness, but also the only healer as well.

The core of the book - and this is where Avalos...