Kitap 1
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The opposite symptoms attend the other species; namely, collapse of the organs, and diminution of the natural size, with intense feeling of suffocation, insomuch that it appears to themselves as if the inflammation had disappeared to the internal parts of the thorax, and had seized upon the heart and lungs. This we call Synanche, as if from the disease inclining inwardly and producing suffocation. It appears to me that this is an illness of the spirit (pneuma) itself, which has under-gone a morbid conversion to a hotter and drier state, without any inflammation of the organ itself. Nor is this any great wonder. For in the Charonæan caves the most sudden suffocations occur from no affection of any organ,The Charonæan ditches or pits here mentioned, were in Phrygia. See Strabo, xii. 8. They are mentioned by Galen, de usu partium, vii.; Epid. i.t. xvii. p. 10, ed. Kühn; and Pliny, H.N. vii. 93. Their pestilential exhalations are often noticed by ancient authors. but the persons die from one inspiration, before the body can sustain any injury. But likewise a man will be seized with rabies, from respiring the effluvia of the tongue of a dog, without having been bitten. It is not impossible then, that such a change of the respiration should occur within, since many other phenomena which occur in a man bear a resemblance to external causes, such as juices which become spoiled both within and without. And diseases resemble deleterious substances, and men have similar vomitings from medicines and from fevers. Hence, also, it was not a wonderful thing, that in the plague of Athens, certain persons fancied that poisonous substances had been thrown into the wells in the Piræus by the Peloponnesians; for these persons did not perceive the affinity between a pestilential disease and deleterious substances.
