In Hammurabi’s collection of 282 laws, the following decisions set the fees for successful operations and the punishment for physicians’ errors. The prescription of mutilation of a surgeon as the punishment for mutilation of a patient from the highest social class (law number 218) squares with the legal principle of equivalent punishment (“an eye for an eye”) that occurs throughout Hammurabi’s law code—a principle applied differently to patients of lower social classes.
215. If a physician performed a major operation on a freeman with a bronze scalpel and has saved the freeman’s life, or he opened up the eye-socket of a freeman with a bronze scalpel and has saved the freeman’s eye, he shall receive ten shekels1 of silver.
216. If it was a commoner, he shall receive five shekels of silver.
217. If it was a freeman’s slave, the owner of the slave shall give two shekels of silver to the physician.
218. If a physician performed a major operation on a freeman with a bronze scalpel and has caused the freeman’s death, or he opened up the eye-socket of a freeman and has destroyed the freeman’s eye, they shall cut off his hand.
219. If a physician performed a major operation on a commoner’s slave with a bronze scalpel and has caused his death, he shall make good slave for slave.
220. If he opened up [the slave’s] eye-socket with a bronze scalpel and has destroyed his eye, he shall pay half his value in silver.
Source: Adapted from James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. with supplement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 175.
Question to Consider
What does the nature of these punishments reveal about the different social worth of the physician and his patients?