Search the Scriptures: Modern medicine and Biblical personages_图书大全
Search the Scriptures: Modern medicine and Biblical personages
ISBN: 9780397590605
定价: 0.00
内容简介
THE BIBLE is a rich lode. Depending on what they are searching
for, prospectors find a variety of nuggets in its inexhaustible
seams.
Adherents of Judaism and Christianity discover deposits of divine
revelation. For some it contains magnificent literature in its poetry,
hymns, and dirges. For others it is literature, particularly the King
James version, which has influenced English prose with its resonant
rhythms and sonorous style. For still others it is vivid political history,
narrating the ebb and flow of kingdoms in a crucial part of the world.
Finally, there are those who use it as an archaeological guide to the
location of many places long since obliterated by devastations from
man and nature.
Now comes a distinguished endocrinologist, Robert B. Greenblatt,
M.D., to do his own special kind of prospecting. Using the physician s
diagnostic tools, hc mincs nuggets of insight into the illnesses that
at~icted the Bible s storicd characters. From scriptural descriptions he
infers that Esau was suffering from hypoglycemia, a syndrome of low
blood sugar, and thus was so deathly weak that he was willing to sell
his birthright for life-sustaining "pottage. : He suggests that the giant
Goliath may havc bcen suffering from a pituitary tumor, pressing on
the optic nerve, which obstructed his peripheral vision and made him
an easier prey for David.
Dr. Greenblatt discovers techniques that were forerunners of
certain medical practices today. When the good Samaritan bound up
the wounded traveler with "oil and wine," was he revealing the
ingenuous conviction of the ancients that wine had curative power,
explained today as the power of the benevolent fungus shared by wine
and penicillin? A fascinating account of the plants and shrubs referred
