Ma´aseh Tobiyyah was composed by Tobias Cohn (1652-1729) who came from Cracow, studied at the celebrated medical school in Padua, and subsequently moved to Adrianople where he became physician to five successive Ottoman sultans. It compares the human body to the structure of a house, for example the hair is likened to the roof, the eyes to the windows and the mouth to the door. The analogy was not new but a development of a similar analogy used by William Harvey (1578-1657) who discovered the circulation of the blood. Harvey referred to the thorax as a 'parlour', the stomach as the 'kitchen' or 'shop' and spoke of 'furnaces to draw away phlegm, rayse the spirit'.

Hebrew, printed at the Bragadin Press, Venice; dated 1708.
Wellcome EPB 18258/B folio 105v, 106r; Allan 26. (Image no.L24382)