Abstract
In Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies between Magic and Science, Jason Mokhtarian revisits the Babylonian Talmud’s (Bavli’s) medical traditions with the goals of applying contemporary rabbinics scholarship to this material and using these traditions to further contextualise the Bavli in its historical Sasanian setting. Whereas, according to Mokhtarian, talmudic medical sources have been both marginalised (Chapters 1 and 2) and mischaracterised as ‘magic’ (Chapters 4 and 5) Mokhtarian urges readers to pay heed to these traditions as medical insofar as they reflect the use of ‘empirical therapies for specific bodily illnesses’ (p. 43). He writes, ‘Many of these therapies subscribe to the principles of observation, trial and error, or personal experience…these features of the empirical, drug-based therapies conform to some (though admittedly not all) of the basic contours of what we today identify as medicine, at least to the extent that they attempt to heal or prevent bodily illness through observation and the wielding of natural drugs’ (p. 37).
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