Code of King Hammurabi

Code of King Hammurabi
Civilization as we recognize it today, with cities, organized agriculture, government and a legal system. Dates back some 6000 years top the valley of the Nile and the adjacent land Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates.

Above all, man learned to write, and translation (an extremely difficult task) of carvings on stone, statues and tombs and writings on baked clay from Mesopotamia and papyri from ancient Egypt give us a much clearer idea of what medicine and surgery must have been like in those times.

The medicine of Mesopotamia was primarily medico-religious.

Practitioners were priests and were rule by the strict laws included in the code of King Hammurabi.

This code carved on a black stone about eight feet high which was discovered at Shush on what is now Iran in 1901, can be seen today in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

At its top can be seen the Emperor Hammurabi receiving the laws from the sun god Shamash.

His code details family law, the rights of slaves, the penalties or theft and the rewards for success and the severe punishment for failure on the part of the surgeon.

We have evidence from these writings that surgical conditions such as wounds, fractures and abscesses were treated.

“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 a nobleman, he will give him three shekels of silver.

If the physician has heal 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 shekel’s lf silver.

If a doctor has treated a man or a severe wound with a bronze instrument and the man dies an if he has opened the spot in the man’s eye with the instrument of bronze but destroys the man’s eye, his hand are to be cut off.”

It was obviously a dangerous profession on those days.

If it were not for Hammurabi’s code of laws 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.
Code of King Hammurabi