PART 4
IV. 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
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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 phlegmatic1 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.
