PART 3
But how of the aforementioned things should be investigated and explained,
I will now declare in a clear manner. A city that is exposed to hot
winds (these are between the wintry rising, and the wintry setting
of the sun), and to which these are peculiar, but which is sheltered
from the north winds; in such a city the waters will be plenteous
and saltish, and as they run from an elevated source, they are necessarily
hot in summer, and cold in winter; the heads of the inhabitants are
of a humid and pituitous constitution, and their bellies subject to
frequent disorders, owing to the phlegm running down from the head;
the forms of their bodies, for the most part, are rather flabby; they
do not eat nor drink much; drinking wine in particular, and more especially
if carried to intoxication, is oppressive to them; and the following
diseases are peculiar to the district: in the first place, the women
are sickly and subject to excessive menstrua-
[p. 21]tion; then many are unfruitful
from disease, and not from nature, and they have frequent miscarriages;
infants are subject to attacks of convulsions and asthma, which they
consider to be connected with infancy, and hold to be a sacred disease
(epilepsy). The men are subject to attacks of dysentery, diarrhea,
hepialus,
1 chronic fevers in winter, of epinyctis,
2 frequently, and
of hemorrhoids about the anus. Pleurisies, peripneumonies, ardent
fevers, and whatever diseases are reckoned acute, do not often occur,
for such diseases are not apt to prevail where the bowels are loose.
Ophthalmies occur of a humid character, but not of a serious nature,
and of short duration, unless they attack epidemically from the change
of the seasons. And when they pass their fiftieth year, defluxions
supervening from the brain, render them paralytic when exposed suddenly
to strokes of the sun, or to cold. These diseases are endemic to them,
and, moreover, if any epidemic disease connected with the change of
the seasons, prevail, they are also liable to it.
