Chapter 2: mesopotamia

No treatise of ancient Mesopotamian clinical neurology has yet been written, although much groundbreaking work on medical or medically-related texts from this area (modern Iraq) has been performed in recent years. All through Mesopotamian civilization (c. 3000-100 BC), literary and erudite knowledge, recorded on clay tablets in cuneiform script, thrived; within the scholarly collections of medical texts, signs and symptoms of many afflictions were referred back to external agents entering in contact with the patient's body, albeit invisibly. This external etiological sphere pertained to the supernatural, although the Mesopotamians viewed it as a constituent part of reality. A similar deterministic approach may be traced in the earliest layers of Greek medicine, but it was repudiated by Hippocratic medical thought. The 40-tablet series of sakikkū ("Symptoms") shows a vast number of entries on neurological symptoms and syndromes pertaining to: headache, motor and sensory impairments, coma, seizure and epilepsy, cranial trauma, spinal cord trauma, brain tumors and abscesses, strokes, pediatric neurology, basal ganglia disorders, (perhaps) Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, rabies, tetanus, and cerebral malaria. Recurring sets of supernatural agents are behind these afflictions: possibly they had become, over time, mere "labels" for a technical pinpointing of the disorders themselves.