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If at the rising of the Dog Star rain and wintery storms occur and the
Etesian
winds blow [Mediterranean winds that blow from the north
for several weeks during the summer], there is hope that these diseases
will cease, and that the autumn will be healthy. Otherwise, it is
likely to be a fatal season to children and women, and least of all to
old men; and that convalescents will pass into
quartans [fevers
were named according to their period of cyclical recurrence; a quartan
fever is one that recurs every every fourth day counting the first day
of onset as day one], and from quartans into dropsies [edema]
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If the winter be southerly, rainy and mild, and the spring northerly, dry,
and wintry, then women with child whose delivery is due by spring are apt
to miscarry; and if they do bring forth, have feeble and sickly children,
so that they either die presently or are tender, feeble, and sickly, if
they live. Such is the fate of the women.
The others are subject to dysentery and dry ophthalmia
[eye inflammation], and some have
catarrh [heavy
flow of mucus] beginning in the head and descending to the lungs.
Men of a phlegmatic temperament are likely to have dysenteries; and women,
also, from the humidity of their nature, the phlegm descending downwards
from the brain; those who are bilious [bad-tempered],
too, have dry ophthalmies from the heat and dryness of their flesh; the
aged, too, have catarrhs from their flabbiness and wasting away of the
veins, so that some of them die suddenly and some become paralytic on the
right side or the left [stroke].
For when, the winter being southerly and the body hot, the blood and
veins are not properly constringed [contracted, constrained];
a spring that is northerly, dry, and cold, having come on, the brain when
it should have been relaxed and purged, by nasal congestion and hoarseness
is then constringed and contracted, so that the summer and the heat occurring
suddenly, and a change supervening, these diseases occur. And such
cities as lie well to the sun and winds, and use good waters, are less
affected by these changes, but those that use marshy and pooly waters,
and lie well both as regards the winds and the sun, these all feel it more.
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If the summer be dry, those diseases soon cease, but if rainy, they are
protracted. Sores are apt to fester from the slightest cause. Lienteries
[failure to digest food before eliminating it] and
dropsies supervene at the conclusion of diseases since the bowels do not
readily dry up.
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If the summer and autumn be rainy and southerly, the winter must be sickly.
Ardent fevers are likely to attack the phlegmatic and men over forty; pleurisy
and pneumonia attack those that are bilious.
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If the summer is dry and northerly, but the autumn rainy and southerly,
headache and mortifications of the brain are likely to occur; and in addition
hoarseness, nasal congestion, coughs, and in some cases, consumption.
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But if the season is northerly and without water, there being no rain,
either during the Dog Star or at Arcturus [August
through mid-September], it is beneficial to those who are naturally
phlegmatic and those who are of a humid temperament, and with women; but
it is most harmful to the bilious; for they become much parched up, and
are attacked by dry ophthalmia, fevers both acute and chronic, and in some
cases melancholy. For the most humid and watery part of the bile
is dried up leaving the thickest and most acrid portion, and similarly
with the blood. Consequently these diseases come upon them.
But all these are beneficial to the phlegmatic, for they are thereby dried
up, and reach winter not oppressed with humors.
Whoever studies and observes these things may be able to foresee most of
the effects which will result from the changes of the seasons. One
ought to be particularly on guard during the greatest changes of the seasons,
and neither willingly give medicines, nor apply the cautery [instrument
used to burn tissue to seal blood vessels and prevent the spread of infection]
or knife to the belly for at least ten days.
Now, the greatest and most dangerous are the two solstices, and especially
the summer, and also the two equinoxes, but especially the autumnal.
One ought also to be guarded about the rising of the stars, especially
of the Dog Star, then of Arcturus, and then the setting of the Pleiades;
for diseases are especially apt to prove critical in those days, and some
prove fatal, some pass off, and all others change to another form and another
constitution. |