Heilkunde und Hochkultur. I: Geburt, Seuche und Traumdeutung in den antiken Zivilisationen des Mittelmeerraumes (review)

This collection of papers on the topics of birth, epidemics, and the meaning of dreams in the ancient world originated in a series of lectures given at the College of Medicine, University of Cologne, in 1996/97. (A second volume is promised, although the topics to be included are not given.) The contributors are from a variety of disciplines—clinical medicine, medical history, law, Egyptology, to name a few—and the editors' stated intent is to reach a wide audience; hence, academic jargon is eschewed. Indeed, this is a readable and interesting work, spanning the ancient Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian worlds in some detail, and including discussion of Old Testament Jewish, Greek, and Roman practices. A bibliography of relevant current works follows each paper (most are in German, but several are in English or French).

In an introductory section, three papers ostensibly set the stage for those to follow, giving an overview of the ancient civilizations and providing details of what they wrote about epidemics, pregnancy and birth, and the meaning of dreams. However, only two meet that purpose: Egbert von Weiher, "Medizin im Alten Orient" (including Assyria and Babylonia), and Christian Leitz, "Die medizinischen Texte aus dem Alten Ägypten," present succinct yet comprehensive discussions of the relevant texts from their respective areas and the concepts related to medicine—broadly conceived—that must be considered when reading about how civilizations so removed from our own practiced the healing arts. Although of interest, Theodore Kwasman's paper on epilepsy in Jewish sources, "Über Epilepsie in jüdischen Quellen," is confined to that one topic; the reader wishes for an inclusive review of ancient Jewish medical texts and practices like those in the papers preceding it. Disappointingly, the ancient Jewish medical world is largely absent from this volume.

Plague and epidemics are treated in four papers in the second section of the book. Especially interesting are discussions of the different causes to which ancient people ascribed epidemics, and the details that modern scholars have been able to supply in interpreting texts to try to determine exactly what the disease in question may have been. Two papers discuss plague generally in the ancient Near East and Egypt; two discuss specific authors: Thucydides and the 430 B.C. plague of Athens, and Lucretius (ca. 95-55 B.C.), whose De natura rerum became a model for such writing.

Part three consists of seven papers on theories about conception, pregnancy, and birth in the civilizations mentioned. As before, the Near Eastern cultures and Egypt receive comprehensive overview treatments, while the other papers are on unique topics, such as Roman law governing numerous aspects of pregnancy and legitimacy issues. All are worthwhile and reveal that basic questions were discussed as early as two thousand years before Christ—such as when life begins, how conception occurs, and how to prevent or ensure conception. It was enlightening to read that a great deal was known about conception, development of the fetus, and birth at a very early time. Unique to the collection is a thorough and lucid paper by Felix Klein-Franke on ancient Chinese theories of conception and pregnancy based on the principles of yin and yang.

The volume closes with four papers on the role that dreams played in the ancient world, and a fifth by Heinz Schott discussing how ancient theories of dream interpretation were used from the Romantic period until the time of Freud. Dreams were important for ancient civilizations, being thought of as representing communications from the gods, omens for the future, and aids for diagnosis in medicine (to name but a few uses).

As a whole, this book is not only a useful reference on certain health-related topics...