Book 2
8
Thus, for example, when a bubo develops following an accidental woundAs a bubo is a swelling in the groin, we must suppose that the wound referred to would be in the leg or lower abdomen. gastric digestion does not become impaired until the patient has become fevered; neither the bubo nor the sore of itself impedes in any way or damages the activity of the stomach. But if fever occurs, the digestion at once deteriorates, and we are also right in saying that the activity of the stomach at once becomes impaired. We must add, however, by what it has been impaired. For the wound was not capable of impairing it, nor yet the bubo, for, if they had been, then they would have caused this damage before the fever as well. If it was not these that caused it, then it was the excess of heati.e.. fever as a cause of disease. (for these two symptoms occurred besides the bubo — an alteration in the arterial and cardiac movementsAs we should say, circulatory changes and an excessive development of natural heat). Now the alteration of these movements will not merely not impair the function of the stomach in any way: it will actually prove an additional help among those animals in which, according to Erasistratus, the pneuma, which is propelled through the arteries and into the alimentary canal, is of great service in digestionThis is the vital spirit or pneuma which, according to Erasistratus and teh Pneumatist school, was elaborated in the left ventricle, and thereafter carried by the arteries all over the body, there to subserve circulatory processes. It has some analogy with oxygen, but this is also the case with the natural spirit or pneuma, whose seat was the liver and which was distributed by the veins through the body; it presided over the more vegetative processes. cf. p. 152, note 1; Introduction, p. xxxiv.; there is only left, then, the disproportionate heat to account for the damage to the gastric activity. For the pneuma is driven in more vigorously and continuously, and in greater quantity now than before; thus in this case, the animal whose digestion is promoted by pneuma will digest more, whereas the remaining factor — abnormal heat — will give them indigestion. For to say, on the one hand, that the pneuma has a certain property by virtue of which it promotes digestion, and then to say that this property disappears in cases of fever, is simply to admit the absurdity. For when they are again asked what it is that has altered the pneuma, they will only be able to reply, the abnormal heat, and particularly if it be the pneuma in the food canal which is in question (since this does not come in any way near the bubo).
