A young man fell in love with a young woman of his town. His feelings were so intense that he became physically ill. He stopped eating. He grew feverish. His family feared he would die of love. The story is preserved in the Book of Exempla as a test case brought before the sages.
Those around the young man proposed a remedy. If the young woman came to him, spoke to him, even let him look at her in some intimate way, perhaps the sickness would pass. They were not proposing marriage. They were proposing a relaxation of the normal rules, a medical exception for a man believed to be dying.
The sages refused. They did not rule that the young man's illness was imaginary. They did not say his suffering was small. They simply declined to purchase his recovery at the price of the woman's dignity. She would not be asked to offer herself for his cure, not even in a carefully guarded form. The sages would not permit licentiousness to be prescribed as medicine, even in the most minimal dosage.
The principle at stake was not the young man's life. It was the line between permitted and forbidden. If that line could be crossed to save one lovesick boy, it could be crossed to save the next, and the next, and before long the line would not exist. The Exempla records the ruling without softening it.
The rabbis of the Talmud were known elsewhere for going to great lengths to save a life. On this case, they drew a boundary. Some forms of healing do more damage than the disease. The young man's fever is not reported as having killed him. The line was held.