Literary text: AIU VIII.B.16

Description

Medical treatise in Judaeo-Arabic. Bifolium from a Judaeo-Arabic paramedical treatise on the virtues of various kinds of animal substances. ¶ . . . grind it and knead it with sheep dung and some saffron and apply it to the gout that arises from the cold. ¶ And against bedbugs, take the bile of a billy goat and mix it with oil and beat it gently and paint with it the bed and the walls, and the bedbugs will go if God wills. ¶ The brain of the kid. Cook it in oil and add sugar and Kirmani cumin and mix it gently, and drink one mithqal in hot water for pain of the heart and the lung. ¶ The brain of the goat. . . . ¶ Goat milk is lighter than the milk of women or donkeys, and camel milk is good for a dry cough. ¶ To make iron poisonous, take sour goat milk and mix it with the blood of a billy goat and the urine of an ox, and mix it together and rub it on the blades and the arrowheads, and immerse the blades in it when they are red-hot. . . . This is for an enemy. ¶ The hide of the weasel. If you make parchment from it and write on it for the insane and the possessed (or captives? מחבוסין), it is effective. ¶ The Barbary sheep. The bile of the Barbary sheep, if it is mixed with frankincense and ginger and drunk in the bath on an empty stomach, is effective against pain of the spleen. ¶ The brain of the Barbary sheep. Mix it with honey and rue water, and he who has pain in the liver should drink two dirhams of it on an empty stomach. It is hot. ¶ The monkey. He who tastes the meat of a monkey will never speak again but will ישיר (?). ¶ The heart of the monkey. It should be roasted and יגכף (?). Grind it and dissolve two dirhams of it in wine and aged honey, and palpitations and shortness of breath will go away, and it will give courage to the coward and sharpen the mind and help with a headache. And if you wish to give someone bad dreams, put the hide or the hair of a monkey under his head. ¶ Take as snuff a lentil-sized piece of monkey kidney with the milk of a female slave and violet oil for the smell that [the fragment ends here]." ASE