Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/37



sadness will come upon the land and it will lose some of its importance.

If a woman gives birth to a child whose face resembles the beak of a bird, there will surely be peace in the land.

If a woman gives birth to a child the right hand of which lacks fingers, the sovereign of that country will be taken prisoner by his enemies.

The keen interest taken by the priests in the matter of predicting the outcome of various diseases led in due time to their making records of the nature, symptoms and progress of the latter. Although this practice was inaugurated purely for the purpose of enabling them to foretell with greater accuracy the probable issue of any given malady, it nevertheless served also to establish on a firm basis the custom of keeping records of the case-histories. Only one thing more was now needed to render this practice the first step in a genuine advance of medical knowledge; but this step could not be made in Babylonia, where priestcraft and superstition had struck such deep roots in the public life. It was only in free Greece, and at a time in its history when the spirit of Hippocrates exerted an overpowering influence over the minds of men, that the separation of the functions of the physician from those of the priest became possible and was in due time effected. (Neuburger.)

Before closing this very incomplete account of the state of medical knowledge in Babylonia, it will be well to mention some of the items of the law laid down by Hammurabi (circa 2200 B. C.) for the guidance of the physicians of that land with regard to the remuneration which they should receive. At the same time I shall make no attempt to reconcile the statement of Herodotus (given on page 12) with the wording of this law, which distinctly recognizes the existence of physicians in Mesopotamia. Possibly the conditions in Nineveh in the fourth century B. C. were different from what they had been eighteen centuries earlier.

If a physician makes a deep cut with an operating knife of bronze and effects a cure, or if with such a knife he opens a tumor