Book 1
11
Such physicians as have given cold water to pleuritics, I cannot comprehend upon what principle they did so, nor can I approve the practice from experience; for if certain patients have escaped the danger from having taken cold water, these would appear to me not to have been pleuritic cases at all. But by the older physicians, a sort of congestion was called pleuritis, being a secretion of bile with pain of the side, attended with either slight fever or no fever at all. This affection, indeed, got the name of pleurisy, but it is not so in reality. But sometimes a spirit (or wind, pneuma) collecting in the side, creates thirst and a bad sort of pain, and gentle heat; and this ignorant persons have called pleurisy. In them, then, cold water might prove a remedy through the good luck of the person using it; for the thirst may have been extinguished, and the bile and wind expelled downwards, while the pain and heat have been dissipated. But in inflammation of the side and swelling of the succingeus, not only cold water but also cold respiration is bad.
11
If, then, owing to the treatment formerly described persons affected with pleurisy survive the attack, but have still a short cough, and now and then are seized with heat, we must hasten to dissipate these symptoms; for the residue of the disease either produces a relapse, or it is converted into a suppuration.
