[p. 24]sun heating them, they necessarily want their
proper color, are unwholesome and form bile; in winter, they become
congealed, cold, and muddy with the snow and ice, so that they are
most apt to engender phlegm, and bring on hoarseness; those who drink
them have large and obstructed spleens, their bellies are hard, emaciated,
and hot; and their shoulders, collar-bones, and faces are emaciated;
for their flesh is melted down and taken up by the spleen, and hence
they are slender; such persons then are voracious and thirsty; their
bellies are very dry both above and below, so that they require the
strongest medicines.It can scarcely admit of a doubt that our author here alludes to scurvy. | This disease is habitual to them both in summer
and in winter, and in addition they are very subject to dropsies of
a most fatal character; and in summer dysenteries, diarrheas, and
protracted quartan fevers frequently seize them, and these diseases
when prolonged dispose such constitutions to dropsies, and thus prove
fatal. These are the diseases which attack them in summer; but in
winter younger persons are liable to pneumonia, and maniacal affections;
and older persons to ardent fevers, from hardness of the belly. Women
are subject to oedema and leucophlegmasiae;The leucophlegmasia is treated of in different parts of the Hippocratic treatises, as Aphor. vii., 29; de Morb. ii. By it he evidently meant a species of dropsy. | when pregnant they have
difficult deliveries; their infants are large and swelled, and then
during nursing they become wasted and sickly, and the lochial discharge
after parturition does not proceed properly with the women. The children
are particularly subject to hernia, and adults to varices and ulcers
on their legs, so that persons with such constitutions cannot be long-lived,
but before the usual period they fall into a state of premature old
age. And further, the women appear to be with child, and when the
time of parturition arrives, the fulness of the belly disappears,
and this happens from dropsy of the uterus. Such waters then I reckon
bad for every purpose. The next to them in badness are those which
have their fountains in rocks, so that they must necessarily be hard,
or come from a soil which produces thermal waters, such as those having
iron,
|