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OF ARETÆUS, THE CAPPADOCIAN, ON THE CAUSES AND SYMPTOMS OF CHRONIC DISEASE
BOOK I.
[p. 296]
completed in its own peculiar symptoms, the affection vertigo
is formed, from a humid and cold cause. But if it turn to an
incurable condition, it proves the commencement of other
affections--of mania, melancholy, or epilepsy, the symptoms
peculiar to each being superadded. But the mode of vertigo
is, heaviness of the head, sparkles of light in the eyes along
with much darkness, ignorance of themselves and of those
around; and, if the disease go on increasing, the limbs sink
below them, and they crawl on the ground; there is nausea
and vomitings of phlegm, or of yellow or black bilious matter.
When connected with yellow bile, mania is formed; when
with black, melancholy; when with phlegm, epilepsy; for it
is liable to conversion into all these diseases.
CHAPTER IV. ON EPILEPSY
EPILEPSY is an illness of various shapes and horrible; in the
paroxysms, brutish, very acute, and deadly; for, at times, one
paroxysm has proved fatal. Or if from habit the patient can
endure it, he lives, indeed, enduring shame, ignominy, and
sorrow: and the disease does not readily pass off, but fixes its
abode during the better periods and in the lovely season of
life. It dwells with boys and young men; and, by good
fortune, it is sometimes driven out in another more advanced
period of life, when it takes its departure along with the
beauty of youth; and then, having rendered them deformed,
it destroys certain youths from envy, as it were, of their
beauty, either by loss of the faculties of a hand, or by the
distortion of the countenance, or by the deprivation of some
one sense. But if the mischief lurk there until it strike root,
