On Diseases in the Bible: A Medical Miscellany

Document notes

Original title: De morbis biblicis miscellanea medica A Latin compilatory medical miscellany that applies the diagnostic apparatus of seventeenth-century faculty medicine to the diseases and bodily afflictions reported across the Old and New Testaments. Bartholin gathers scriptural cases—Job's boils, Nebuchadnezzar's descent into beastliness, the 'fiery serpents' of the wilderness, the woman with the flow of blood, Adam's deep sleep, Jacob's lamed hip, and the anointing with oil—and assigns each a natural pathological name drawn from Galenic and Hippocratic medicine, while reserving for divine action (raptum divinum) whatever medicine cannot explain. Arranged as a lexical progression through scriptural disease-language rather than a systematic treatise, it also engages philological, iconographic, and antiquarian questions (such as the Vulgate's 'horned' Moses and the radiate Nimbus) and includes a consolatory dedication treating the puerperium as a mortal disease. Written from within a Lutheran confessional setting, it navigates the contested boundary between the faculties of medicine and theology, including a polemical treatment of the oleum infirmorum. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

• Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here
• View the original source file

Document excerpt

THOMÆ BARTHOLINI De MORBIS BIBLICIS MISCELLANEA MEDICA. Editio secunda correctior. IN CONATV LABOR FRANCOFURTI ex Bibliopolio Hafniensi DANIELIS PAULLI, Regii Librarii.