The Michigan Medical Codex: P. Mich. Inv. 21 - Corso di Papirologia

124 L. C. Youtie
The papyrus is medium brown in color and the ink is dark brown, almost
black.5) The scribe used a blunt pen and the resulting letters are thick and
somewhat coarse. Slanting slightly to the right, they are without ligature
and normally run to 18-23 letters per line. Alpha and delta often have a
similar appearance, as also mu and nu; pi is made with two strokes, the
second curving inward, so that it often resembles omicron. The letters are
for the most part bilinear with the exception of E,p,u,w,Q and occasionally
T which drop below the line. Abbreviations are infrequent: final nu at the
end of a line is found as a short horizontal stroke above the preceding let
ter,6) as in Enpr(v) in 21 B v.12; and oT(U6XaL) is found in B v.11 with an
oblique stroke through the bottom of tau. Symbols for drahms (5), ounces (ro),
and pounds (1) are employed throughout. Cf. Gal. XIX 750.7)
Corrections and additions are entered above the line by the scribe and
also by a second hand using very black ink. The second hand has further
filled all of the lower margins of 21 G-M with additional material. This hand
was in all likelihood that of the physician-owner of the codex. Writing
cursively with a finer pen and employing much smaller letters and frequent
abbreviations, he managed to attain as many as 8 lines of ca. 45 letters
each and still keep a bottom margin of .5-1 cm.
Punctuation in the body of the text is effected by a blank space within a
line, high points, paragraphoi, forked paragraphoi, a blank space of one
line, and indention of lines. Marginal symbols are found only in the second
hand in 21 A, 7; H, 8-10; M, 5-10. Cf. notes ad loc.
Our codex is almost entirely composed of medical recipes for plasters or
poultices to be applied to wounds, ulcers of various kinds, carbuncles,
herpes, erysipelas, ruptures of sinews or tendons, surgical incisions,
fractures, etc. Additional recipes of the same type were added in the deep
margins at the bottom of each page from 21 G-M and presumably also in the
missing lower margins of 21 A-F. Our codex is reminiscent of the collections
6f recipes of the ancient medical writers and the further collections cited
and used by those writers.8) Cf., e.g., the thirty consecutive recipes for
cicatrizing plasters in Galen XIII 524-534. The first twelve recipes he took
from a collection of Asclepius which included recipes attributed by Asclepius
to Marcellas, Euphranor, Attalos, Pamphilos, Telamon, 9) and Moschion. The
5) On the use of brown metallic inks beginning in the middle of the third
century A.D. see E.G.Turner, Greek Manuscripts, p.22 and footnote 3.
6) For this abbreviation occurring in well-written literary works from the
middle of the second century onward, see E.G.Turner, Greek Manuscripts, p.17.
7) Opera omnia, Vols. I-XX (Leip-zig, 1821-1833), ed. C.G.Kuhn.
8) For collections of medical recipes in papyri and ostraca see Pack2 2390
2433 (passim), Sammelbuch VIII 9860, P.Mich. Inv. 482 (Le Monde Grec, 555),
MPER N.S. XIII (passim), P.Haun. III 47.
9) For the recipe of Telamon (?) in our codex see E, 9-15.