In the second half of the twentieth century, the medical community adopted the scientific method as a basis for practice. It seemed that after thousands of years the way was paved for a regulated process: from the laboratory through the clinical trial to the patient's bed. But it soon became clear that the road is neither straight nor continuous. Clinical research only offers unequivocal answers in a few cases. The balance between benefit and risk does not end with a statistical calculation; A significant part of the consideration of the factors that determine the change of medical practice is based on values, worldview and interests. Many factors are involved in the path leading from the laboratory to the patient: scientists, doctors, pharmaceutical and technology companies, politicians, regulators, and at the end of the path stand the patients themselves. Each of these factors uses the means at its disposal to influence the final result - the diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of the patient. The path of progress from the laboratory to the patient is also not continuous: sometimes the intervals between steps are large, sometimes sudden jumps occur after a prolonged period of slowing down and even stopping. Scientific and clinical research depends on the initiative, skills and determination of the researchers, and not a little on coincidences and has no fixed timetables. This book is dedicated to revealing the evolution of medical practice, to identifying fundamental changes in practice and to describing the winding way in which they were accepted and assimilated into the body of medical knowledge and the mutual relationship between the doctor and the patient.

Do physical trauma, illness and disability necessarily cause depression? Who is the audience applying to the field of medical psychology? What are the moral values and ethical issues that concern medical psychologists? What is unique about the medical psychologists working within the health systems? These questions and many more may be answered in this book, which deals with medical psychology: A field that specializes in psychology intended for those dealing with various diseases, with all the consequences that arise from them. This is the first book in Hebrew dedicated to this field, which forms a bridge between the professions of medicine and psychology and between academia and therapy. The book is intended for psychologists, mental health professionals and all those involved in the fields of health and medicine.

Korot is devoted to the study of the philosophical, sociological and ethical aspects of the history of medicine and Judaism. The topics covered by the journal include: medicine in Jewish and Hebrew sources, the history of Jewish physicians, medicine in Palestine and Israel and medicine during the Nazi period. Each volume contains mostly English-language articles, together with some Hebrew contributions (abstracted in English). The "Historical Notes" and "Notes and Events" sections cover recent important developments and events in the above mentioned topics around the world. Each issue also includes several reviews of noteworthy books and contributions to the field.

Korot is devoted to the study of the philosophical, sociological and ethical aspects of the history of medicine and Judaism. The topics covered by the Journal include: medicine in Jewish and Hebrew sources, the history of Jewish physicians, medicine in Palestine and Israel and medicine during the Nazi period. Each volume contains mostly English-language articles, together with some Hebrew contributions (abstracted in English). The "Historical Notes" and "Notes and Events" sections cover recent important developments and events in the above mentioned topics around the world. Each issue also includes several reviews of noteworthy books and contributions to the field. In this issue - Ethics and the Health Professions: Education of the Holocaust and Healthcare.

In October 2018, results of a randomized controlled trial showed an excess mortality mainly from cancer, among “healthy” people over the age of 70 who took aspirin, in contrast to many clinical studies previously published. This event was another record in the crisis in scientific medicine that has been unfolding before our eyes in recent decades. In this book the author tries to trace the causes of the shocks that afflict the medical knowledge base, and to offer solutions to strengthen and stabilize it. This book includes four parts. The first part discusses aspirin as a test case for development of clinical research. The second part is devoted to a discussion of the seven foundations of modern clinical research while revealing the pros and cons of each and their relative contribution to the pursuit of scientific truth. In the third part, five groundbreaking discoveries are examined. In each of them, the process that led to the discovery is deciphered, emphasizing the findings making clinical research, on the way from bench to bedside, redundant. In the fourth part the author exposes the rules of the competition among scientist, and determines its impact on the conduct of research and its results.

In 2018, some 770 health technology systems costing 3 billion shekels were submitted to the Israeli Health Basket Committee as candidates for public funding. The committee chose 107 of them, amounting to 460 million shekels, the total sum of its state budget. The need to prioritize medical technologies exists in most health systems worldwide. A Basic Course in Health Technology Assessment provide the tools for making tough decisions faced by such committees.

In this issue we have articles, in Hebrew, by Professor Avi Ohry, on sanatoria in the Land of Israel, and by Reuven Gafni, on Russian-born Olga Feinberg who served the Arab and Jewish communities in Jericho during the British Mandate until forced to leave, with the destruction of her home, during the riots of 1936–1939. Dror Hubara looks at the example of providing quality medical care in a poor neighborhood in Israel, that of the old Yemenite settlement of Kfar Shiloaḥ close to the Mount of Olives, which came to an end in 1939. Moshe Pinchuk considers Hippocratic and Mesopotamian medicine in the texts of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. In her intriguing article Adaya Hadar looks at how the human pulse and its rhythms were understood by the early Hassidic masters, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, in different spiritual and metaphysical ways. Zipora Shehory-Rubin and Shifra Shvarts contribute an important addition to our understanding of school doctors from the Ottoman period till the end of the British Mandate. This saw the beginnings of provision of health services to students, pioneered by physicians like Dr. Hillel Yaffe (1864–1936) and Dr. Mordechai Brachyahu (1882–1959), first hygienist physician in Israel. In the English section Samuel Kottek also looks at medicine in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, reviewing several texts on medicine and hygiene, while Edward Reichman features an unusual medical halachic case tried many times as a ritual murder and focusing, partly, on the religious practices of Jews regarding removing a fetus at the time of death, or soon after. Much has been written about Mordechai Gumpel (Gumpertz) Schnaber Leviso(h)n and his role in the early Haskalah movement but Kenneth Collins’ paper concentrates on the years he spent in London and the links he established there with Christian Hebraists and freemasons, as well as on his medical studies with the famed Hunter brothers and his London medical practice and writings. His short Historical Note examines the question whether the early enlightenment rabbi, Baruch Schick of Shklov, was in London in the early 1770s during the time of Levisohn’s period there. Ephraim Nissan looks at the life and death of the Polish-Jewish neurologist Maksymilian Rose (1883–1937), considering the causes of his sudden death in prewar Vilna, which still has significance some eighty years later. Prof. Avi Ohry offers an important account of the career of Berthe Neoussikine (Batia Nose-Chen), a largely forgotten figure from rehabilitation medicine and electro-physiology in France and Israel. Korot has been carrying articles from the regular workshops and conferences on Medicine and the Shoah organized by Boaz Cohen, Miriam Offer and Shmuel Reis and, following the international event held in Akko last year, we plan to publish several papers on this topic in our next issue.

This book surveys the development of Jewish religious law and practice in relation to healthcare, with an emphasis on their influence on Israeli medical law. It contains discussions on the nature of Jewish law and and ethics, especially in comparison to Catholic moral theology and the Western political traditions . The book is divided into key themes: approaches to health, illness and the body; medical nursing and social services; doctor-patient relationships; the uses of the dead and living body; fertility, genomics and infertility; Jewish sexual ethics and the medicalization of religion; abortion; care for neonates; the timing of death and organ transplantation from the brain-dead, and end-of-life care . The book should be of interest to students and scholars of bioethics, Jewish religious law, history of Israeli law, and the interactions between social history of medicine and biomedical law . This is a much expanded and revised Hebrew version of the 2014 book Jewish Medical Ethics published by Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Mozes presents a reflection of his own personal 25-year journey through the fields of clinical practice, clinical epidemiology, and history and philosophy of medicine. His journey passes through 20 stations. Most of the chapters deal with problems that are at the focus of contemporary public debate, such as cholesterol and heart disease, screening for early detection of breast cancer, hormone replacement therapy to treat menopause symptoms, hypertension, diabetes, asthma, vaccination, obesity and bariatric surgery, depression and dementia. At the same time Mozes tries to open a skylight on the personal experiences, motives and desires that drove him to delve into the various topics, and select his particular point of view. "Benjamin Mozes easily refutes many prejudices, touching upon the connections between fears, motivations, beliefs and anxieties, while being attentive to the state of the contemporary man - lending a wise and compassionate ear to patients." (from a review by Ariel Hirschfeld).

In recent years, more and more students have been taking Health Economics courses in the framework of different academic programs. These students are mostly health professionals who had not been exposed to the world of economics before. This textbook aims to introduce the material intuitively, in an informal and non-technical way, and above all – in Hebrew. The book is the fruit of extensive experience, its author having taught the course at the Hebrew University, Ben Gurion University, Tel Aviv University and Yale University.

The present volume 23 of Korot has as main topics, first, embryology in Jewish and ancient Middle Eastern sources, and second, medicine in the Holocaust. The section on embryology consists of six articles, four of which were presented in a symposium entitled “On Fetuses, Infants and everything in-between through the Ages,” which was held at the Van Leer Institute on March 30, 2015. The meeting was sponsored by the Israel Society for the History of Medicine and by Korot, and organized by Dr. Israela Nili. Three of the papers concentrate on ancient Mesopotamia: Dr. Couto-Ferreira describes embryological data in Akkadian and Sumerian texts, Prof. Klein expounds embryological issues in the omen literature, and Prof. Fleishman discusses some of the legal aspects of parenthood. Prof. Cohen analyzes the influence of Septuagint translation in the debate concerning abortion. Two additional papers deal with later Hellenistic sources: Prof. Kottek and Dr. Paavilainen discuss the contribution of Philo the Alexandrian and Prof. van der Horst examines Hellenistic Christian sources, respectively. The section on the Holocaust includes three studies. Dr. van den Ende’s paper describes the ethical dilemmas faced by the Jewish doctors in Holland during the Nazi occupation. It was first presented in the workshop of the 15th Nahariya Conference on Medicine and the Holocaust (May 6, 2015), convened by Prof. Shaul Shasha. Dr. Schwoch deals with the same issue from the point of view of the Jewish Krankenbehandler in Germany. Dr. Offer’s bibliographical review, the first part of which has been published in Korot, volume 22, describes the development of academic research in Jewish medicine in the Holocaust from the third decade after the Holocaust until the first decade of the 21st century. The rest of the articles presented in this volume concentrate on the life and work of several Jewish physicians, the only exception being Prof. Nissan’s paper on hybrid animals in Jewish sources. Prof. McDonald analyzes the story of the Jewish personal physician of Charles the Bald, accused by later authors of having poisoned the king. Prof. Gath discusses a similar topic: Jan III Sobieski and his Jewish physician, who was later blamed for having caused his death. Dr. Nevins casts new light on the mystery of Vesalius’ Jewish friend and adviser in Hebrew medical terms. Prof. Shḥori-Rubin’s work on Dr. Fanny Lvova continues her series of articles on Jewish pioneer women doctors. Dr. Paavilainen describes Isaac Israeli’s way of diagnosing the complex symptoms of consumption. Prof. Freudenthal summarizes the different pressures affecting medieval Jewish physicians and explains on the basis of a contemporary source why science did not thrive among the Jewish scholars of Provence. The volume is, as usual, bilingual (12 articles in English, 4 in Hebrew), with contributions from Spain, Holland, Germany, Britain, USA, France, and of course Israel.

This issue discusses two main topics: "Serpents in Jewish Lore" - a trans­cultural topic treated as such in four essays and Holocaust Medical Studies. The latter will henceforth be considered a regular topic in KOROT, and will include a selected number of studies presented at the annual meetings of the Nahariya Conferences on Medicine in the Holocaust, convened by Prof. Shaul Shasha. Contents EDITORIAL The Serpent in Medicine, Medical Culture and the Jewish Tradition Ephraim Nissan The Cyclical Snake in Jewish Sources: An Examination of Occurrences of the Ouroboros Samuel Kottek The Serpent in the Talmud Kathleen Walker-Meikle Toxicology and Treatment: Medical Authorities and Snake-Bite in the Middle Ages Helena Paavilainen Viper Bite Therapies in Maimonides‘ On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs Holocaust Studies Miriam Offer The Study of Jewish Medicine during the Holocaust: Its Creation and Preliminary Steps Etienne Lepicard True Friendship or Relation against Nature? The Libman-Carrel Correspondence, 1923–1934 Peter Schwarzand and Wolfgang Neugebauer Medicine without Humanity: A Brief Outline of the History of Nazi Euthanasia in Vienna, Austria, 1938­1945 Kenneth Collins Practicing Humanity: Four Medical Practitioners and their Holocaust Legacy Varia Moshe Feinsod A Distant Reflection: The Physician in the Eye of the Jewish Medieval Satirist Kalonymus ben Kalonymus (1287­1337?) Zalman Greenbergand and Anton Alexander Professor Israel Jacob Kligler: List of Publications HISTORICALNOTES Kenneth Collins Samuel Levenston: An Historical Footnote Avi Ohry Jewish Physicians and Scientists' Historical Contributions to Society Korot of the Past Joshua O. Leibowitz The 25th Anniversary of Koroth L. Wislicki The Day of Nazification of a Hospital in Berlin BOOK REVIEWS Wolfgang Uwe Eckart: Medizin in der NS­Diktatur: Ideologic, Praxis, Folgen, 2012. Danielle Gourevitch: Limos kai Loimos: A Study of the Galenic Plague, 2013. Regis­Nessim Sachs: Medecins juifs du Xe au XVIIe siecle, 2014. Robert Weston: Medical Consulting by Letter in France 1665­1789, 2013.