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It emerges from this that the blood test employed by Rav Saadia
Gaon is definitive and can identify mamzerim. However, we cannot
yet establish whether the blood tests performed nowadays can be
relied upon in the same measure to establish mamzerus, as we shall
explain:

The Chasam Sofer’s view (Yoreh De’ah 158 s.v. ve’hinei bi’teshuvah
and 175 s.v. ve’hashta) that halachah’s reliance on physicians who say
that a patient is dangerously ill and must eat on Yom Kippur or that
Shabbos should be desecrated to save his life, is only because they
may be correct and even a possibility of piku’ach nefesh sets aside
all Torah prohibitions, is well known. We do not unreservedly trust
that their evaluations are correct, because they may be mistaken. So
too writes Mahari Assad (Yehudah Yaaleh, Yoreh De’ah 193), namely
that the reliability of physicians about that which they cannot see
with their own eyes, based [solely] on their medical knowledge is
not complete but is with reservation. He explains that the Sanhedrin
must therefore be experts in medicine so that they can estimate the
strength of an assault victim [and the likelihood of the blow he sus-
tained ending his life] and with Divine Assistance rule with certainty
on capital cases1. In the sefer Avnei Tzedek (1), the author writes that
physicians who testify that a woman who finds marital life difficult
and that she will not return to normal health in order to allow the
husband to marry an additional wife, should not be relied upon, for it
is possible that superior physicians will find a remedy for her ailment.
He notes that it is an everyday occurrence that physicians in one place
say that a particular patient’s illness is incurable and other physicians
find him a remedy. All medical findings should therefore be viewed as
possibilities, not certainties.

As for Rav Saadia Gaon who relied on the blood test he conduct-
ed, it’s possible that this had been transmitted to him from Chazal.
It‘s possible too that that test can only be relied upon in a case like
this, where it was known that one of them was the merchant’s son

1. See Mahari Aszod’s comments cited earlier, siman 112, on the topic of ‘the Pur-
pose of the Sages of the Sanhedrin’s Medical Knowledge.’

110 1 Medical-Halachic Responsa of Rav Zilberstein