Medicine in MesopotamiaCivilization as we recognize it today with cities, organized agriculture, government and a legal system dates back some 6000 years to the Valley of the Nile and the adjacent land of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates.
Great Kings arose, such as Sargon of the city of Akkad (around 2350 BC), who subjugated the whole of Sumeria and Hammurabi (around 1900 BC), who established his capital at Babylon.
In time, Babylon was conquered by Tiglath-Pileser, king of the northern neighbor Assyria, with its capital at Nineveh around 1100 BC.
The medicine of Mesopotamia was primarily medico-religious. Practitioners were priests and were ruled by the strict laws include in the code of King Hammurabi.
This code, carved, on a black stone about eight feet high which was discovered at Shush in what is now Iran in 1901, can be seen today in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
His code details family law, the right of slaves, the penalties for theft and rewards for success and severe punishment for failure on the part of the surgeon.
There are evidence from these writings that surgical conditions such wounds, fractures and abscess were treated. Thus it can be read:
If a doctor heals a free man’s broken limb and has healed a sprained tendon, the patient is to pay the doctor five shekels of silver.
If it is the son of nobleman, he will give him three shekels of silver.
If the physician has healed a man’s eye of a severe wound by employing a bronze instrument and so healed the man’s eye, he is to be paid ten shekels of silver.
If a doctor has treated a man for a severe wound with a bronze instrument and the man dies and if he has opened the spot in the man’s eye with the instrument of bronze but destroys the man’s eye, his hands will be cut off.
If it were not for Hammurabi’s code of law, all memory of surgery in Babylon, nearly 4000 years ago, would have been lost.
Surgery as a craft was hardly worth mentioning only when it became of interest to the law was it engraved in stone.
Medicine in Mesopotamia
