Problemata Aristotelis

Why is it that, although the vices of bile are expected to be contracted during the summer, acute diseases that certainly consist of bile burden the body more through phlegm? Is it because those accompanying fevers are acute because they are violent? Indeed, violence is contrary to nature. For when certain parts of the body become moist, an inflammation arises from the excess of heat, and since this occurs only through an overabundance of heat, fevers can certainly follow. Therefore, in the summer season, dry and hot vices affect men badly. But in winter, moist and hot things produce acute diseases, for they kill quickly since they cannot be digested due to the abundance of overgrown humor.

Why does a pestilential disease alone among all vices especially affect those who have come near to those laboring with that disease? Is it because this one alone is common to all men among all diseases? Therefore, it easily brings the plague to all who are already in a depraved state. For it happens that, as if a certain tinder were added to those lying ill with the disease, that vice immediately leaps out and is conceived in others.

Why, if northern winds occupy the winter, but the spring exhibits southern winds and rains, is the following summer usually grievous with both fevers and eye infections lippitudo inflammation/discharge of the eyes? Is it because the summer takes hold of our bodies while they are containing a mutation of humor, and the earth is damp, and the place of habitation is very moist, and it is rendered such as that which is perpetually grievous? First, therefore, eye infections emerge when the excretions of humor begin to fall into the head. For it is to be understood that the same thing can be rendered both very hot and very cold, just as water or stone is heated, for the former burns and the latter does so more vehemently. Thus it happens that the air, taking on a fuller heat by reason of its density, flares up, and bodies are vexed in like manner by anxiety and heat; indeed, heat in the body is a fever, while in the eyes it is an infection. Finally, when the season changes, every hot thing perverts the body when, of course, the sky is still...