Search the Scriptures: Modern medicine and Biblical personages

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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