4
But the following is the condition of cities with the opposite situation, facing the cold winds that blow from between the summer setting and the summer rising of the sun, being habitually exposed to these winds, but sheltered from the hot winds and from the south. First, the waters of the region are generally hard and cold. The natives must be sinewy and spare, and in most cases their digestive organs are costive and hard in their lower parts, but more relaxed in the upper. They must be bilious rather than phlegmatic. Their heads are healthy and hard, but they have in most cases a tendency to internal lacerations. Their endemic diseases are as follow. Pleurisies are common, likewise those diseases which are accounted acute. It must be so, since their digestive organs are hard, and the slightest cause inevitably produces in many patients abscesses, the result of a stiff body and hard digestive organs. For their dryness, combined with the coldness of the water, makes them liable to internal lacerations. Such constitutions necessarily make men eat much and drink little; for one cannot be both a great eater and a great drinker. Inflammations of the eyes occur at last; they are hard and violent, and rapidly cause rupture of the eyes. Men under thirty suffer from violent bleedings at the nose in summer. Instances of the disease called sacred are rare but violent. These men are more likely to be long-lived than are others. Their sores become neither phlegmaticSuppurating. nor malignant, but their characters incline to fierceness, not to mildness. For men these diseases are endemic, besides there are epidemic diseases which may prevail through the change of the seasons. As to the women, firstly many become barren through the waters being hard, indigestible and cold. Their menstrual discharges are not healthy, but are scanty and bad. Then childbirth is difficult, although abortion is rare. After bearing children they cannot rear them, for their milk is dried up through the hardness and indigestibility of the waters, while cases of phthisis are frequent after parturition, for the violence of it causes ruptures and strains. Children suffer from dropsies in the testicles while they are little, which disappear as they grow older. In such a city puberty is late.
