Julius Preuss.

THE OLDEST known Hebrew medical writing is that of Asaph which dates from the seventh century.' Since the ancient Hebrews left us no specific medical texts, our only sources of knowledge on this subject are the medical and hygienic references found in the Jewish sacred, historical, and legal literatures.2 It is from these that the fragments of our knowledge of their medical views and practices have been gathered. The difficulty has been great, for the material is scant and its meaning often uncertain; the period which these sources cover is very long. Much of the material is "popular medicine"; most, if not all, was transmitted by laymen. The first systematic studies of the medicine of the Bible were published early in the seventeenth century, among the first fruits of the study of the Bible awakened by the Reformation. The earlier books dealt only with the Old and the New Testaments (with the single exception of the dissertation of Gintzburger of 1743). It was not until the nineteenth century that studies included the Talmud and other ancient Hebraic writings.3 The literature that has grown up during the past three centuries is very extensive; much of it deals with special subjects; much embraces studies limited to single works such as the Talmud. As would be expected, these studies reflect the scientific spirit of their period, the uncritical or the critical attitude of the Biblical scholars, and the current views on medicine. The writers have, for the most part, been Biblical students; others were students of medical history; there are afew who were both. R. J. Wunderbar, who completed his Biblisch-Talmudische Medizin in 1860, was a layman. Wilhelm Ebstein, whose writings appeared in 1901 (Die Medizin im Alten Testament, Stuttgart, Enke) and 1903 (Die Medizin in Neuen Testament und im Talmud, Stuttgart, Enke) was dependent upon the use of available fragmentary translations. Other works concerning all of Biblical-Talmudical medicine did not exist. It was not until the publication of Julius Preuss' Biblisch-Talmudische Medizin in 1911 that we acquired a reliable, comprehensive, and scholarly exposition of the subject by a first-class physician on the one hand, and a thorough semitic philologist, who made the history of medicine his life's study, on the other.4 Julius Preuss (Figure 1) was born on 5 September 1861 in the small village of Gross-Schoenbeck near Potsdam in Uckermark, Germany.5 His was the only Jewish family in the village. Young Preuss attended the public schools in the town of Angermunde and then entered the Gymnasium in Prenzlau, where he distinguished