[p. 85]
of water upon health is very great. Such as are
marshy, standing and stagnant must in summer be
hot, thick and stinking, because there is no outflow ;
and as fresh rain-water is always flowing in and the
sun heats them, they must be of bad colour, unhealthy
and bilious. In winter they must be frosty,
cold and turbid through the snow and frosts, so as
to be very conducive to phlegm and sore throats.
Those who drink it have always large, stiff spleens,
and hard, thin, hot stomachs, while their shoulders,
collar-bones and faces are emaciated ; the fact is
that their flesh dissolves to feed the spleen, so that
they are lean. With such a constitution they eat
and drink heavily. Their digestive organs, upper
and lower, are very dry and very hot, so that they
need more powerful drugs. This malady is endemic
both in summer and in winter. In addition the
dropsies that occur are very numerous and very
fatal. For in the summer there are epidemics of
dysentery, diarrhoea and long quartan fever, which
diseases when prolonged cause constitutions such as
I have described to develop dropsies that result in
death. These are their maladies in summer. In
winter young people suffer from pneumonia and
illnesses attended by delirium, the older, through
the hardness of their digestive organs, from ardent
fever. Among the women occur swellings and leucophlegmasia ;
they conceive hardly and are delivered
with difficulty. The babies are big and swollen, and
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