Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary - Cuneiform Monographs by John Z Wee Hardcover

About the Book

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook, whose atypical language and ideas were harmonized with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body.

Book Synopsis

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary is intended for historians of medicine and interpretation, and explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook.
In line with commentators' self-fashioning as experts of diverse disciplines, commentaries display intertextuality involving a variety of lexical, astronomical, religious, magic, and literary compositions, while employing patterns of argumentation that resist categorization within any single branch of knowledge. Commentators' choices of topics and comments, however, sought to harmonize atypical language and ideas in the Handbook with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body in therapeutic recipes. Scholastic rhetoric--supposedly unfettered to any discipline--served in fact as a pretext for affirming current forms of medical knowledge.

Review Quotes

"The two-volume work of John Z. Wee is a welcome new contribution to the discussion of Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform commentaries--an at times complex and, to readers unaware of its intricacies, often opaque textual genre, mainly known from the late time of Cuneiform Culture. (...) The first volume addresses not only Assyriologists but also scholars interested in the history of medicine and the history of interpretation and science. The study presented here includes a great many detailed discussions and presentations of interrelated issues within Mesopotamian commentary literature particularly in relation to the DH and its structure, as well as the context of these commentaries and their arguments in respect to their use and institutional background. Volume two provides the relevant data, presenting a collective edition of all commentaries on the DH so far known. This offers the particular advantage of making all relevant data accessible in a printed, citable form together with detailed philological commentaries and discussions on difficult or peculiar words and phrases."
- Eric Schmidtchen, Université de Genève, in Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXVIII N° 3-4 (2021).

"In short, John Wee's Knowledge and Rhetorical in Medical Commentary in an erudite and refreshing analysis of Sa-gig and its commentaries. Although a highly specialized subject, some of his broader observations about serialization, canonization, textual sources of authority, and embedded variants may be helpful for folks in religious studies thinking about so-called canon, interpretive practices and textual sources of authority, and the boundaries in the ancient world of what we often designate science and literature."
- William Brown, in The Biblical Review, 2021.

About the Author

John Z. Wee, Ph.D. (2012), Yale University, is Assistant Professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago. He is author of books and articles on medicine and astronomy in Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman antiquity, and editor of The Comparable Body (Brill, 2017).