Medical laws in the Code of Hammurabi

A surgeon who made a large incision with an operating knife and cured the patient, or opened a tumor over the eye and saved the eye, was owed ten shekels. If the patient was a freed man the fee was five shekels, and for a slave the owner paid two. So ran laws 215 to 217 of the code issued by Hammurabi, king of Babylon.

Failure was priced on the same scale. If the patient died under the knife, or the operation destroyed his eye, the surgeon's hands were to be cut off. If the slave of a freed man died, the surgeon had to replace him with another slave, and if the slave lost an eye the surgeon paid half the slave's value. Setting a broken bone or healing a diseased soft part earned five, three or two shekels, again by rank, and separate laws set the fees and penalties of veterinary surgeons who operated on oxen and asses. Another law made a man who wounded someone in a quarrel, and swore he had not meant to, pay the physicians.

The laws were carved on a basalt stele 2.25 meters tall. At the top a relief shows the god Shamash facing Hammurabi, a scene that gave divine backing to the king's rule and to the judgments below. The prologue says the laws were given so that the strong should not harm the weak. The Louvre dates the stele to Hammurabi's reign, 1792 to 1750 BCE. It was made in Mesopotamia and found at Susa during the excavations led by Jacques de Morgan in 1901 and 1902.

The epilogue shows how little some wounds could be helped. It calls on the goddess Nin-karak to strike any king who defaces the laws with high fever and wounds that cannot be healed, whose nature the physician does not understand and cannot treat with dressings.