00 Cover 1730

endowed with the same four qualities – heat, cold, dryness and humidity. The

four humours – blood, yellow and black bile, and phlegm – had to be kept in

balance by, for example, bloodletting, and doctors had special zodiacal calen-

dars to identify the best times for bleeding.^38 The Talmud gives clear evidence

of the widespread practice of bloodletting and although Maimonides himself

counselled against it as a reliable treatment it retained its popularity down to

modern times.

The rabbinic Responsa literature of the Middle Ages, where the

mediaeval rabbis respond to questions by their followers, contains much of

300 | Traditional medicine

Figure 11.3 Fragments of a letter written by Maimonides. (Taylor-Schecter Geniza Newsletter
2005.)