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PART 14

XIV. When regimen has been restricted you must

[p. 331] not suppress for long a long-standing desire of the patient.1 In a chronic disease indulgence too helps to set a man on his feet again, if one pay the necessary attention to one who is blind.2 As great fear is to be guarded against, so is excessive joy. A sudden disturbance of the air is also to be guarded against.3 The prime of life has everything lovely, the decline has the opposite. Incoherence of speech comes from an affection, or from the ears, or from the speaker's talking of something fresh before he has uttered what was in his mind before, or from his thinking of fresh things before he has expressed what was in his thoughts before. Now this is a thing that happens without any "visible affection" socalled, mostly to those who are in love with their art. The power of youth, when the matter is trifling,4 is sometimes supremely great. Irregularity in a disease signifies that it will be a long one. A crisis is the riddance of a disease. A slight cause turns into a cure unless the affection be in a vital part. Because5 fellow-feeling at grief causes distress, some are distressed through the fellow-feeling

[p. 333] of another. Loud talking is painful. Overwork calls for gentle dissuasion.6 A wooded7 district benefits.

1 Too strict a regimen may do harm by the patient's using up his strength in conquering his appetites. Some such verb as κατέχειν must be substituted for ἐγχειρεῖν.

2 I. e. the patient does not know what is good for him.

3 I. e. either (a) a draught or (b) a sudden change in the weather.

4 Possibly, "when the patient is not a big man." ὑποκείμενον, can mean "patient" in later Greek.

5 Possibly, "for the same reason that."

6 ὑποπαραίτης1ις2 is not found in the dictionaries, but may be correct.

7 ἀλυώδης2 is unmeaning, and I translate as though ἀλς1ώδης2 were in the text.

Hippocrates Collected Works I. Hippocrates. W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1868.

National Library of Medicine History of Medicine Division provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by Data Entry and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

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