and thus avoids damaging the patient's eye, he shall receive as his reward 10 shekels of silver. If the patient is an emancipated slave, the fee shall be reduced to 5 shekels. In the case of a slave the master to whom he belongs shall pay the physician 2 shekels.
If a physician makes a deep wound with an operating knife of bronze and the patient dies, or if he opens a tumor with such a knife and the patient's eye is thereby destroyed, the operator shall be punished by having his hands cut off.
If a physician, in operating upon the slave of a freedman, makes a deep wound with an operating knife of bronze and thus kills the patient, he shall give the owner a slave in exchange for the one killed. And if, in opening a tumor with such a knife, the physician destroys the slave's eye, he shall pay to the latter's owner one-half the slave's value.
If a physician effects the healing of a broken bone or cures a disease of the intestines, he shall receive from the patient a fee of 5 shekels of silver.[1]
It would be difficult to imagine anything better adapted
to arrest the development of medical knowledge in a nation
than the promulgation of a law like that ascribed to
Hammurabi; and one cannot be surprised at the statement
made by Herodotus, eighteen centuries later, "that there
were no physicians in Babylon." Foolhardy, indeed, would
be the man who, for the sake of earning a possible reward
of six shekels of silver, would be willing to risk the danger
of having both his hands cut off; and yet every conscientious
and faithful practitioner of medicine in Babylon at
the time mentioned must necessarily have been obliged to
run this risk.
Medicine in Ancient Egypt.—Of the sources of information with regard to the knowledge of medicine possessed by the ancient Egyptians the most important are the following: Homer's Odyssey; Herodotus; Diodorus; Clemens of Alexandria; Pliny's Natural History; Dioscori-**
- ↑ From the statements just quoted it appears that a certain kind of bronze (an alloy of copper and tin, with the addition perhaps of a little zinc) was used in Assyria, in the manufacture of surgical knives, as early as during the twenty-third century B. C. Dr. Meyer-Steineg, Professor of the History of Medicine in the University of Jena, Germany, assures the writer that knives made of this material are susceptible of being given as keen a cutting edge
