Abstract
Most Akkadian therapeutic medical texts offer simple, pragmatic instructions for healing a given illness, without referring to religious and/or magical concepts. The same is true for descriptions of the symptoms of an illness and diagnoses that simply give the name of specific diseases. There are, however, many medical texts that name deities or demons as the agents who have caused a given illness. The present article examines whether a statistically verifiable relationship can be observed between the reference to demons or deities as the cause of an illness and the recommended therapeutic concept (pragmatic or extended by symbolic and/or religious and/or magical elements). This leads on to the question of whether the recommendation of a specific therapy depends on the type of illness diagnosed. The study is based mainly on texts dealing with skin diseases; by way of comparison, a group of therapies addressing psycho-social complaints is included in the discussion.
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