PART 1
In Thasus, early in autumn, the winter suddenly set in rainy before
the usual time, with much northerly and southerly winds. These things
all continued so during the season of the Pleiades, and until their
setting. The winter was northerly, the rains frequent, in torrents,
and large, with snow, but with a frequent mixture of fair weather.
These things were all so, but the setting in of the cold was not much
out of season. After the winter solstice, and at the time when the
zephyr usually begins to blow, severe winterly storms out of season,
with much northerly wind, snow, continued and copious rains; the sky
tempestuous and clouded; these things were protracted, and did not
remit until the equinox. The spring was cold, northerly, rainy, and
clouded;
[p. 103] the summer was not very sultry, the Etesian winds blew constant,
but quickly afterwards, about the rising of Arcturus, there were again
many rains with north winds. The whole season being wet, cold, and
northerly, people were, for the most part, healthy during winter;
but early in the spring very many, indeed, the greater part, were
valetudinary. At first ophthalmies set in, with rheums, pains, unconcocted
discharges, small concretions, generally breaking with difficulty,
in most instances they relapsed, and they did not cease until late
in autumn. During summer and autumn there were dysenteric affections,
attacks of tenesmus and lientery, bilious diarrhoea, with thin, copious,
undigested, and acrid dejections, and sometimes with watery stools;
many had copious defluxions, with pain, of a bilious, watery, slimy,
purulent nature, attended with strangury, not connected with disease
of the kidneys, but one complaint succeeding the other; vomitings
of bile, phlegm, and undigested food, sweats, in all cases a redundance
of humors. In many instances these complaints were unattended with
fever, and did not prevent the patients from walking about, but some
cases were febrile, as will be described. In some all those described
below occurred with pain. During autumn, and at the commencement of
winter, there were phthisical complaints, continual fevers; and, in
a few cases, ardent; some diurnal, others nocturnal, semi-tertians,
true tertians, quartans, irregular fevers.
