| [p. 30]tender, feeble,
and sickly, if they live. Such is the case with the women. The others
are subject to dysenteries and dry ophthalmies, and some have catarrhs
beginning in the head and descending to the lungs. Men of a phlegmatic
temperament are likely to have dysenteries; and women, also, from
the humidity of their nature, the phlegm descending downwards from
the brain; those who are bilious, too, have dry ophthalmies from the
heat and dryness of their flesh; the aged, too, have catarrhs from
their flabbiness and melting of the veins, so that some of them die
suddenly and some become paralytic on the right side or the left.
For when, the winter being southerly and the body hot, the blood and
veins are not properly constringed; a spring that is northerly, dry,
and cold, having come on, the brain when it should have been expanded
and purged, by the coryza and hoarseness is then constringed and contracted,
so that the summer and the heat occurring suddenly, and a change supervening,
these diseases fall out. And such cities as lie well to the sun and
winds, and use good waters, feel these changes less, but such as use
marshy and pooly waters, and lie well both as regards the winds and
the sun, these all feel it more. And if the summer be dry, those diseases
soon cease, but if rainy, they are protracted; and there is danger
of any sore that there is becoming phagedenic from any cause; and
lienteries and dropsies supervene at the conclusion of diseases; for
the bowels are not readily dried up. And if the summer be rainy and
southerly, and next the autumn, the winter must, of necessity, be
sickly, and ardent fevers are likely to attack those that are phlegmatic,
and more elderly than forty years, and pleurisies and peripneumonies
those that are bilious. But if the summer is parched and northerly,
but the autumn rainy and southerly, headache and sphacelus of the
brain are likely to occur; and in addition hoarseness, coryza, coughs,
and in some cases, consumption. But if the season is northerly and
without water, there being no rain, neither after the Dogstar nor
Arcturus; this state agrees best with those who are naturally phlegmatic,
with those who are of a humid temperament, and with women; but it
is most inimical to the bilious; for they become much parched up,
and ophthalmies of a dry nature supervene, fevers both acute and chronic,
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