BabMed-Principal Investigator Markham J. Geller will give a talk at the Annual Meeting of the EABS 

A Catalogue of Disease in the Babylonian Talmud

This paper will present a catalogue of diseases affecting parts of the body listed from head to foot, with associated prescriptions, in the form of a medical handbook preserved in the Babylonian Talmud (Gittin 68-70), in connection with a long-known Mandaic incantation published by Lady Drower in 1946, A Phylactery for Rue (Orientalia 15), later discussed by C. Müller-Kessler (Fs. Ranger, 1999). The Mandaic text preserves a similar list of ailments in more-or-less the same sequence as the Gittin passage, with both the Gittin and Mandaic texts containing Akkadian loanwords, which provide clues to the origins of these texts.

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