Medical texts from ancient Mesopotamia stand in a wider tradition of scribal scholarship, including texts that deal with astronomy and astrology, mathematics, and law. The main characteristics of scholarly texts and, in particular, those that deal with the sciences, provide a context for the study of form and content of medical texts. For example, medical texts employ the casuistic formula and, rather than setting down general theories, present concrete descriptions of medical problems, whether these were once observed or merely theorised. The ways in which symptoms and diseases are described and arranged in the medical texts reflect the methods of Mesopotamian scholarship more generally, and these works seem to reflect an attempt by scholars to make sense of the world around them and to organize it into a comprehensible framework.

The Kassite, or Middle Babylonian, period was especially important in the long-term process of standardisation and canonisation of such texts. Although the process by which works of the scientific disciplines reached their final form is not explained or even mentioned in the sources, it is thought to be the work of Kassite period transcribers and editors, since many representative texts of the scholarly tradition emerged from the library of Tiglath-Pileser I (who ruled from 1115-1107 BC) – so they emerged in essentially the same form in which they are attested in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian copies.

The oldest known complete medical text is from about 2000 BCE and is in Sumerian ([LINK]; see also Civil). It is also the only medical text in Sumerian. It is a therapeutic text that deals with many types of misfortunate, among them medical problems, including headaches.

The rest of the known sources for the study of Mesopotamian medicine are in Akkadian.

The text SA.GIG, or Sakikkû, which translates loosely to “symptoms”, is considered to be the canonical diagnostic series in Akkadian, comprised of 40 tablets arranged into six chapters, which was compiled and edited by the scribe and scholar Esagil-kīn-apli during the reign of Adad-apla-iddina (1067-1046 BC). Known to modern scholars as the Diagnostic Handbook, the work provides information about symptoms, disease names, prognosis, and disease causation. Middle Babylonian diagnostic texts that differ from the main Diagnostic Handbook may represent forerunners to this canonical text or a competing tradition.

A typical entry from the Diagnostic Handbook employs the casuistic formula, whereby the protases presents information about symptoms, patients, and the course of the illness, and the apodosis gives some combination of a diagnosis, cause, and prognosis. Below is an excerpt from Tablet 3, which forms part of the second chapter of the Diagnostic Handbook and deals with symptoms relating to the face.

While the Diagnostic Handbook provided an important tool to physicians, it lacked instructions for the treatment of illnesses and conditions, which come from therapeutic texts. These are quite diverse and often include a diagnostic introduction that sets out the symptoms for which treatment is being sought, and then a medical prescription that often includes both medical and magical elements. The distinction between medical treatments on the one hand, and magical treatments, on the other, is a modern invention that obfuscates the connection between natural and supernatural phenomena prevalent in the medical texts; however, the distinction is often relied upon in the secondary literature and is therefore preserved here for the sake of consistency.

These are commentaries on specific words, phrases, or passages from the Diagnostic Handbook but must be treated with care, as they come from much later periods, namely the 4th century BCE onwards, and at times reflect a lack of understanding on the part of later scribes.

There are numerous other sources for the study of medical traditions, practices, illness, and health in ancient Mesopotamia. Letters, for example, can include descriptions of medical problems, especially those between the Neo-Assyrian king Esarhaddon and his royal physicians and scholars. Literary texts contain references to illnesses and symptoms that can sometimes be linked with those that appear in the Diagnostic Handbook. In addition, there is one lexical series dedicated to the human body known as UGU.MU, and lists of diseases, including the Old Babylonia List of Diseases and a Standard Babylonian recension of the same. However, strictly speaking, medical texts are confined to the ones detailed in the above typology.