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14* Amir Ashur and Efraim Lev

two unpublished letters from the Genizah that deal directly with medical issues
and one practical prescription. These fragments are important first-hand accounts
of the actual medical problems from which the Genizah people suffered, and how
they were treated.

We argue that each of the three fragments presented and edited below
represents a different genre of medical document from which diverse insights
into medieval practical medicine can be derived:27

A ‘Consilia’ — a communication between medical practitioners.
Consilia (plural of consilium, ‘advice’) is a literary genre originating
from the case studies of a 13th century Florentine doctor of medicine,
Taddeo Alderotti. It consists of practical down-to-earth medical
advice based on experiential observations, later used in treating the
Black Death plague that decimated Italy in the mid-14th century and
kept recurring at generational intervals in the following centuries. A
consilium was a doctor’s written report in response to a particular
case where the malady had been determined. In the consilium the
doctor identified the disease and prescribed the appropriate treatment.
The accumulation of consilia circulated in manuscript form began,
for the first time in Europe, to lay down a corpus of medical practice,
case-by-case.28 The main characteristics of this type of communication
between Jewish Egyptian physicians in the Genizah documents are
a long opening, including praising and flattering the other colleague
detailed descriptions of symptoms, medical conditions and the efforts
to treat them (surgery, remedies, diet...etc.); criticism of drugs that
were previously used, or on procedures performed; a request to obtain
their colleague’s opinion, with thanks in advance; quotations from the
Bible and other Jewish sources.

27 On consilia see, e.g S. De Renzi, ‘A Career in Manuscripts: Genres and Purposes of a
Physician’s Writing in Rome, 1600y1630’, Italian Studies 66/2 (2011), pp. 234y48

28 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilia(29.2.12).