Ancient Medicinal Recipes and Therapeutic Advice

Medical wisdom from antiquity is often presented as a recipe or series of recipes for substances to ingest or apply, frequently accompanied by ritualistic actions. The book of Tobit, a Jewish novella dating to the third century BCE, describes how the book’s protagonist is struck blind and then offered a formula for a cure. The rabbis provide prescriptions for a variety of ailments. It is often the case that modern understanding of these ailments is a matter of speculation, given the sparse details offered. In the texts here, many terms are left untranslated because the specific words are otherwise unknown or unclear.