Book 1
11
In all dangerous cases you should be on the watch for all favourable coctions of the evacuations from all parts, or for fair and critical abscessions. Coctions signify nearness of crisis and sure recovery of health, but crude and unconcocted evacuations, which change into bad abscessions, denote absence of crisis, pain, prolonged illness, death, or a return of the same symptoms. But it is by a consideration of other signs that one must decide which of these results will be most likely. Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future; practise these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two thingsto help, or at least to do no harm. The art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician. The physician is the servant of the art. The patient must co-operate with the physician in combating the disease.
12
Pains about the head and neck, and heaviness combined with pain, occur both without and with fever. Sufferers from phrenitis have convulsions, and eject verdigris-coloured vomit; some die very quickly. But in ardent and the other fevers, those with pain in the neck, heaviness of the temples, dimness of sight, and painless tension of the hypochondrium, bleed from the nose; those with a general heaviness of the head, cardialgia, and nausea, vomit afterwards bile and phlegm. Children for the most part in such cases suffer chiefly from the convulsions. Women have both these symptoms and pains in the womb. Older people, and those whose natural heat is failing, have paralysis or raving or blindness.
THIRD CONSTITUTION
