The stuff of causation: etiological metaphor and pathogenic channeling in Babylonian medicine

Models of causation play a central role in defining specific types of scientific thought, and this was also certainly the case with Babylonian medicine (Akk. asûtu), yet traditional expressions of causation, rooted in juridical practice, are never found in the medical corpus. This chapter argues that Babylonian physicians represented disease causation or aetiology in a new way, largely through conceptual metaphors embedded in incantations. These metaphors drew, for the most part, on landscape and atmospheric conditions—rather than supernatural causal agents—to represent unseen processes within the human body. The linear transformation of one type of disease into another, for example, was modelled on the normative movement of food and drink through the gastrointestinal system, and this reflected the dominant role of a fluvial metaphor, in which the human alimentary canal was conceptualised as a river or
waterway.