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Fred Rosner, MD
Maimonides Medical Center Brooklyn, NY

JAMA. 1970;211(9):1544.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The biblical story of the consumption of quails by the Israelites in the desert as described in the 16th chapter of Exodus and the 11th chapter of Numbers continues to intrigue medical historians as well as biblical scholars. The subsequent sudden death of the Israelites is explained by various medical writers to have been due to some form of food poisoning. A recent paper by Ouzounellis (THE JOURNAL211:1186, 1970) postulates that the biblical quail incident was in fact an epidemic of myoglobinuria.

An alternate explanation of the quail affair is that the entire happening was an act of God. Some biblical commentators in fact state that many of the people who died had not consumed any quail at all but were stricken as soon as they raised the meat to their mouths. This is the interpretation of the phrase "while the meat was yet between . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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