I was reading in the Bible book of Luke last week, and came across this passage:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. There in front of him was a man suffering from dropsy. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him away. [Luke 14:1-4; NIV<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ll bet I’ve read that passage scores of times without knowing what, exactly, the condition of “dropsy” entails. Seeing as how it’s never too late to learn something new, I decided to do some quick research. I first headed to my trusty Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible<\/em> (treeware version…the physical heft of a good research tome is one of life’s small joys), where I confirmed that the passage in Luke is the only Biblical appearance of the word. I further learned that the word comes from the Greek hudropikos<\/em><\/a> [hoo-dro-pik-os’<\/em>; Strong’s number 5203], which means “to be dropsical” or “to have the dropsy.” Ah, well. But I saw also that the Greek word is derived from hudatos<\/em> (“water”) and optomai<\/em> (“to appear”). That’s better: one who has dropsy “appears watery.” A quick look at Vine’s Expository Dictionary of Ne<\/em>w Testament Words didn’t add anything, but a glance at this passage in Luke as interpreted by the writers of Good News for Modern Man<\/em><\/a> revealed a description of the afflicted man as “having swollen arms and legs.” Obviously, we’re talking about some kind of edema. And, in fact, this is confirmed by referring to various online medical resources. WebMD includes a reference to dropsy in an article<\/a> about how many modern medical treatments have their roots in relatively ancient tradition:<\/p>\n\n\n\n A number of medicines popular during the Washington and Lincoln eras are still used today in one form or another for the same medical conditions. These include quinine for malaria, opium (from which codeine and morphine are derived) for pain, ipecac plant for dysentery, chalk for heartburn, and senna leaves for laxatives (now we use Senacot). Foxglove — or digitalis — for heart disease, was used back then for what was called dropsy; the doctors knew that condition caused fluid retention, and this plant relieved it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, even though the man described in Luke had a condition that had an ancient name, the condition itself is still around in various forms, and it does appear in literature down through the ages. I point you to this interesting discussion<\/a> of historical references to the disease and its treatment (if the page renders funkily in your browser, copy and paste the text into a Word document). And, finally, I stumbled across a discussion of a modern-day epidemic of dropsy<\/a>, occuring in India in 1998. Those afflicted experienced swelling of their bodies “caused by the consumption of mustard oil adulterated with oil of prickly poppy. Prickly poppy scientifically known as Argemone mexicana<\/em> contains alkaloids with physiologically active toxins (sanguinarine and dihydrosanguinarine).” 2,000 cases were detected, with 41 deaths reported. It’s interesting to note what the WHO<\/acronym> has to say about the treatement of this form of dropsy:<\/p>\n\n\n\n No specific therapeutic measures are established. It has been suggested that diuretic, bioantioxidants, steroids, vitamins, calcium and protein-rich diet have some beneficial effect on epidemic dropsy cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, “we don’t know how to treat it, so we’ll try a lot of things to address the symptoms and then hope for the best.” This is all very interesting (to me<\/em>, anyway), but, so what? Well, the “so what” is this: even today, with all of our scientific and technological advances, the treatment of any form of edema is still hit-and-miss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That makes the little account in Luke — almost akin to a throwaway special effect in a movie — a great deal more significant than we probably give it credit for. Once again, we see the Lord provide healing with just a touch or a word or a glance, even where the best efforts of man still come up short. Guess what? He still does those things for us today, spiritually and physically! That’s a great thought to take with you into the weekend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Amen and amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was reading in the Bible book of Luke last week, and came across this passage: One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. There in front of him was a man suffering from dropsy. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law,… Continue reading The Lowdown on Dropsy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","category-medicine","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2114"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7393,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114\/revisions\/7393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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