Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- THE HEALTHY JEW
- Introduction: “Links in a Long Chain”: Jews, Judaism, Health, and Hygiene
- 1 “'Tis a Little People, But It Has Done Great Things”: The Role of Health and Medicine in Modern Jewish Apologetics
- 2 Moses the Microbiologist: Alfred Nossig's The Social Hygiene of the Jews
- 3 Healthy Hebrews, Healthy Jews: The Bible as a Sanitary Code in Anglo-American Medical Literature
- 4 From Ghetto to Jungle: Darwinism, Eugenics, and the Reinterpretation of Jewish History
- 5 TB or Not TB, That Was a Jewish Question: Moses, Kashrut, and the Prevention of Tuberculosis
- 6 “Then What Advantage Does the Jew Have?”: Judaism as a Model for Christian Health
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: “Links in a Long Chain”: Jews, Judaism, Health, and Hygiene
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- THE HEALTHY JEW
- Introduction: “Links in a Long Chain”: Jews, Judaism, Health, and Hygiene
- 1 “'Tis a Little People, But It Has Done Great Things”: The Role of Health and Medicine in Modern Jewish Apologetics
- 2 Moses the Microbiologist: Alfred Nossig's The Social Hygiene of the Jews
- 3 Healthy Hebrews, Healthy Jews: The Bible as a Sanitary Code in Anglo-American Medical Literature
- 4 From Ghetto to Jungle: Darwinism, Eugenics, and the Reinterpretation of Jewish History
- 5 TB or Not TB, That Was a Jewish Question: Moses, Kashrut, and the Prevention of Tuberculosis
- 6 “Then What Advantage Does the Jew Have?”: Judaism as a Model for Christian Health
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In December 1883, James E. Reeves, the Secretary of the State Board of Health of West Virginia, delivered a speech to the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association. The speech was later printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the nation's most prestigious medical journal. Reeves spoke about the “usefulness of state boards of health in guarding the public welfare” and the intimate link between laws of health, the fitness of the individual citizen, and the “prosperity, freedom, and glory of the State.” He began by noting that
the principles of sanitary science are not of modern origin. Indeed, they are as old as the Mosaic code, and their unerring rewards and penalties have marked the life-history of all the nations that have covered the earth. In their scope, they are wide enough to embrace all humanity, and just as applicable to communities of to-day as they were to the Jewish race thousands of years ago.
Forty-five years later, in the Hebrew language journal The Hebrew Physician (Ha-Ropheh ha-Ivri), Dr. Yosef Tennovim gave voice to the same basic idea, though more forcefully and with greater specificity: “Almost all contemporary medical issues or questions found expression already in ancient Hebrew medicine. Concerning the modern understanding of the circulation of the blood, there are already hints of this understanding in the Talmud, testifying to a specific professional erudition [b'kiyut] long before [William] Harvey….”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Healthy JewThe Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine, pp. 1 - 27Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007