Avodah Zara 29: Medical Remedies, Healing recipes, Distancing Ourselves from Gentiles

A very brief outline of today's daf:

The rabbis continue their descriptions of medical remedies.  These include cold water for facial wrinkles and hot water for the cut caused by a thorn.  Vinegar helps bloodletting.  Small fish will help a fast.  Bloodletting should not follow eating cress, having a fever, or having an eye ache.  Often a remedy is drinking vinegar and wine together. 

A mixture of cumin, mint, horehound, savory and hyssop are drunk with wine to help tonsillitis, and beer to help a chilled pregnant woman.  We are told that cabbage, beets, dry mint/pennyroyal, stomach, womb and diaphragm (and sometimes small fish) are curative.  Ox meat, chelev, roasted meat, fowl, roasted eggs, cress, shaving, a hot bat, cheese and liver hinder healing.  

After thinking more about haircuts - we are forbidden to receive haircuts from Gentiles - we learn that we are not permitted to benefit from many other things belonging to Gentiles.  These include their wine, vinegar, Hadriani earthenware, hides with a hole from which the heart was removed (perhaps only if the hold is round), meat to be used for idolatry, grape skins and pits (perhaps only it they are wet beyond the 12 month marker), fish oil or cheese.  

One of the rabbis' conversations suggests that cheese is only forbidden because it may be processed using the stomach of an animal being used for idolatry.  This must be connected to today's laws regarding rennet in cheese.  If the animal is not being used for idolatry, perhaps the cheese could be kashered.

Our daf ends with a conversation about items forbidden due to fears about benefiting from idolatry.  The deeper meaning of today's daf seems to be that same message: we must distance ourselves from idolatry and from the appearance of idol worship.  Again we see our ancestors accentuating and creating barriers between themselves and other communities.