Medicine in the Talmud by Jason Sion Mokhtarian;

Author:Jason Sion Mokhtarian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520389410
Publisher: University of California Press

CHAPTER 2. TRENDS AND METHODS IN THE STUDY OF TALMUDIC MEDICINE

1. For earlier surveys, see Harry Friedenwald, “The Bibliography of Ancient Hebrew Medicine,” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 23 (1935): 124–57, and Solomon R. Kagan, “The Bibliography of Ancient Jewish Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 22 (1948): 480–85. More recently, see Edward Reichman, “Biblical and Talmudic Medicine: A Bibliographical Essay,” in Encyclopedia of Medicine in the Bible and the Talmud, by Fred Rosner (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2000), 1–9. Producing a comprehensive bibliography on Talmudic medicine would be a monumental task. This book’s bibliography—which focuses on scholarship in English—is nowhere near complete in this regard.

2. See, e.g., John M. Efron, Medicine and the German Jews: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 189. Today one sees a similar tension between ancient rituals and modern science in the case of circumcision, on which see David L. Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

3. For an example of an early study of biblical medicine that assumes the Bible’s sacred character, see the 1672 publication by Thomas Bartholin, On Diseases in the Bible: A Medical Miscellany, 1672, transl. James Willis and ed. Johan Schioldann-Nielsen and Kurt Sørensen (Copenhagen: Danish National Library of Science and Medicine, 1994). Written by a Danish Lutheran doctor and theologian, this book was popular in its time, according to Ole Peter Grell, “Book Review: Thomas Bartholin, On Diseases in the Bible: A Medical Miscellany, 1672,” Medical History 41 (1997): 406–7.

4. One could cite many cases. For examples, see Solomon R. Kagan, “Talmudic Medicine,” Medical Leaves 3 (1940): 164–73, esp. 167–68, who adds that the reason that Talmudic medicine never impacted the practice of medicine throughout the centuries was because non-Jews could not comprehend the Bavli. See also the exaggeration that, when it comes to matters of health, “the Talmud was written a thousand years ahead of its time,” in an 1884 article in JAMA by the Ohioan doctor Carl H. von Klein, “Jewish Hygiene and Diet, the Talmud and Various Other Jewish Writings Heretofore Untranslated,” Journal of the American Medical Association 3 (1884): 345–52, esp. 351. A few years later, in a Cincinnati medical journal, this same author asked colleagues to commission him to write a book on Talmudic medicine; see von Klein, “A Proposition to Translate and Publish the Medicine and Hygiene of the Talmud,” The Cincinnati Lancet and Clinic, March 26, 1887.

5. See Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind (New York: Jason Aronson, 1977), 315–42. But see the negative reviews of this book by Jerome Greenfield, “Reviewed Work: The Jewish Mind by Raphael Patai,” American Jewish History 68 (1978): 231–34, and others. Orthodox perspectives often promote the idea that Jewish success in the sciences is a result of the idiosyncrasies of Jewish texts, history, and genetic makeup. On this, see the article by physicist Cyril Domb, “Jewish Distinction in Science,” in Fusion: Absolute Standards in a World of Relativity—Science, the Arts, and Contemporary Life in the Light of Torah, ed.

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