Book 1
2
But since in all the acute diseases the chest must be remedied, this part generally suffering with the heart and lungs, more especially from the difficulty of the respiration, which is sometimes hot, at other times cold; and, moreover, from ardent fever, cough, badness of the humours, and sympathy of the nerves, and complaint of the stomach, and illness of the pleura and of the diaphragm (for the heart, if it suffer from any dreadful illness, never recovers),—in cases of phrenitis these parts in particular must be soothed. For, indeed, the delirium in certain cases arises from some of the parts in the chest; respiration hot and dry; thirst acrid; febrile heat not easily endured, as being determined from all parts to the chest; and illness from the perversion of its native heat, but greater and more intolerable the communication of the same from the other parts to the chest: for the extremities are cold—the head, the feet, and the hands; but, above these last, the chest. It is to be remedied, then, by humectation and refrigeration. For bathing, oil boiled with camomile or nard; in summer, also, Hellenic rob. But if it be necessary also to apply epithemes, dates moistened with austere wine, then levigated and pounded into a mass with nard, barley meal, and flower of the wild vine, form a soothing cataplasm for the chest: a cooling one is formed of apples bruised with mastich and melilot; all these things, however, are to be mixed up with wax and nard. But if the stomach be affected with torpor and loathing of food, the juice or hair of worm-wood are mixed up with them; and the hypochondriac region is to be fomented with this boiled up in oil. The infusion or the juice of it may be drunk before food to the amount of two cupfuls of the infusion, or one cupful of the bitter juice with two cupfuls of water. But if the stomach be affected with heartburn, not from the constitution of the disease, but of itself from acrid and saltish humours, or from being pinched with bile, or from being parched with thirst, we must give in the food milk mixed with water to the amount of half a hemina of milk in one cupful of water; the patient should swallow the most of it, but he may take a small portion of it with bread.
