This article centres on a case that was brought to the Jewish court in Egypt around the middle of the seventeenth century. The protagonist was a man who was diagnosed with melancholy. The proposed cure, coitus, led the arbiter, Rabbi Mordechai Halevi, to discuss the ethical dilemma concerning its realisation, because the man's wife lived in Istanbul. The article contains two inter-related parts. The first analyses the legal case as a meeting of complementary interests. The second discusses the aetiology and the prevalence of two parallel diseases that were mentioned in the case: sperm-retention melancholy and suffocation of the womb. The article examines the social functions of these diseases, against the background of cultural perceptions of sexuality and gender in the Jewish communities of the pre-modern Middle East, thus shedding new light on patients as historical agents.
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