Hippocrates, De aere aquis et locis
W. H. S. Jones, Ed.

PART 3

[p. 75] the tests to be applied. A city that lies exposed to the hot winds--these are those between the winter rising of the sun and its winter setting--when subject to these and sheltered from the north winds, the waters here are plentiful and brackish, and must be near the surface,¹ hot in summer and cold in winter. The heads of the inhabitants are moist and full of phlegm, and their digestive organs are frequently deranged from the phlegm that runs down into them from the head. Most of them have a rather flabby physique, and they are poor eaters and poor drinkers. For men with weak heads will be poor drinkers, as the after-effects are more distressing to them. The endemic diseases are these. In the first place, the women are unhealthy and subject to excessive fluxes. Then many are barren through disease and not by nature, while abortions are frequent. Children are liable to convulsions and asthma, and to what they think causes the disease of childhood, and to be a sacred disease.² Men suffer from dysentery, diarrhoea, ague, chronic fevers in winter, many attacks³ of eczema, and from hemorrhoids. Cases of pleurisy, pneumonia, ardent fever, and of diseases considered acute, rarely occur. These diseases cannot prevail where the bowels are loose. Inflammations of the eyes occur with running, but are not

[p. 77] serious ; they are of short duration, unless a general epidemic take place after a violent change. When they are more than fifty years old, they are paralyzed by catarrhs supervening from the brain, when the sun suddenly strikes their head or they are chilled. These are their endemic diseases, but besides, they are liable to any epidemic disease that prevails through the change of the seasons.