page_title: Tobias Cohn
section_title: Writings
hierarchical_section_title: Tobias Cohn / Writings
caption_attribution_description: English: Image from Ḥeleḳ rishon mi-Sefer ha-ʻOlamot, o, Maʻaśeh Ṭoviyah, 1708, by Ṭoviyah Kats (Tobias Cohn), 1652?-1729. Heb 7459.800*, Houghton Library, Harvard University
context_page_description: Tobias Cohn or Tobias Kohn was a Polish-Jewish physician of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was born at Metz in 1652.
context_section_description: Cohn was familiar with ten languages - Hebrew, German, Polish, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Latin, Greek, and Arabic. This great linguistic knowledge made it possible for him to write his Ma'aseh Toviyyah (Work of Tobias), published in Venice, Italy in 1707, and reprinted there in 1715, 1728, 1769, and 1850. The work is encyclopedic, and is divided into eight parts: (1) theology; (2) astronomy; (3) medicine; (4) hygiene; (5) syphilitic maladies; (6) botany; (7) cosmography; and (8) an essay on the four elements.
  The most important is the third part, which contains an illustration showing a human body and a house side by side and comparing the members of the former to the parts of the latter (see illustration).
  In part 2 are found an astrolabe and illustrations of astronomical and mathematical instruments. Inserted between parts 6 and 7 is Turkish-Latin-Spanish dictionary; and prefixed to the work is a poem by Solomon Conegliano.
  Cohn's medical knowledge and experiences seem to have been of considerable importance. He gave, from his own observations, the first description of the "plica polonica," as well as many local symptoms and newly discovered medicinal herbs. He also published in three languages a list of remedies.
  He criticized the anti-Semitic professors of Frankfort-on-the-Oder as well as his coreligionists who were devoted to Kabbalah and committed to a blind belief in miracles.
caption: The House of the Body. An allegorical design comparing the organs of the body to the divisions of a house, from Cohn's Ma'aseh Toviyyah (1708)
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