[p. 350]
defluxions, heart-burn, or pain thereof, are not called the
Stomachic affection.
Summer brings on this disease, whence springs the complete
loss of digestion, of appetite, and of all the faculties. With
regard to the period of life, old age; for in old men, even
without any disease, owing to their being near the close of
life, the appetite is nearly gone.
CHAPTER VII.
ON THE CŒLIAC AFFECTION.
THE stomach being the digestive organ, labours in digestion,
when diarrhœa seizes the patient. Diarrhœa consists in the
discharge of undigested food in a fluid state; and if this does
not proceed from a slight cause of only one or two days' duration;
and if, in addition, the patient's general system be debilitated
by atrophy of the body, the Cœliac disease of a chronic
nature is formed, from atony of the heat which digests, and
refrigeration of the stomach, when the food, indeed, is dissolved
in the heat, but the heat does not digest it, nor convert
it into its proper chyme, but leaves its work half finished,
from inability to complete it; the food then being deprived
of this operation, is changed to a state which is bad in colour,
smell, and consistence. For its colour is white and without
bile; it has an offensive smell, and is flatulent; it is liquid,
and wants consistence from not being completely elaborated,
and from no part of the digestive process having been properly
done except the commencement.
Wherefore they have flatulence of the stomach, continued
eructations, of a bad smell; but if these pass downwards, the
bowels rumble, evacuations are flatulent, thick, fluid, or
