[p. 51]
bile, great nausea, burning and weakness prevail.
When the patient gets rid of it, sometimes by purgation,
either spontaneous or by medicine, if the
purging be seasonable he manifestly gets rid both
of the pains and of the heat. But so long as these
bitter particles are undissolved, undigested and uncompounded,
by no possible means can the pains and
fevers be stayed. And those who are attacked by
pungent and acrid acids suffer greatly from frenzy,
from gnawings of the bowels and chest, and from
restlessness. No relief from these symptoms is
secured until the acidity is purged away, or calmed
down and mixed with the other humours. But
coction, alteration, thinning or thickening into the
form of humours through other forms of all sorts
(wherefrom crises also and fixing their periods derive
great importance in cases of illness)--to all
these things surely heat and cold are not in the least
liable. For neither could either ferment or thicken.
†For what shall we call it? Combinations of humours
that exhibit a power that varies with the various
factors.There are many reasons for supposing that this sentence
is either (a) in its wrong place, or (b) an interpolation. It
seems quite irrelevant, and αὐτῶν should grammatically refer
to τὸ θερμὸν and τὸ ψυχρόν, but there is not a crasis of these,
but only of χυμοί. Hot and cold mixed produce only hot or
cold, not a crasis. The sentence might be more relevantly
placed at the end of Chapter XVIII, as an explanation of the
process ἀποκαθίστασθαι πεφθέντα καὶ κρηθέντα. But transposition
will not remove the other difficulties of the sentence. What
is αὐτό? Health or disease? If health, then there is but
one crasis producing it, not "many, having various properties."
If disease, then it cannot be a crasis at all, but
ἀκρασία. Finally, ἄλλην πρὸς2 ἄλληλα is dubious Greek. The
whole sentence looks like an interpolation, though it is hard
to say why it was introduced. The scribe of M seems to
have felt the difficulties, for he wrote κρῆς1ισ2, πλὴν for ἄλλην,
and ἔχους1α. | † Since the hot will give up its heat only
when mixed with the cold, and the cold can be
|