Problemata Aristotelis

...damp, the summer immediately occupies it with dry and hot weather. The vice is also increased if a rainy summer follows. For thus the power of the sun obtains the material widely, which it makes hot, both in bodies, and in the earth, and also in the air. For this reason, fevers and eye infections arise.

Why, if the winter was southern and rainy, but the spring is dry and northern, do diseases exercise bodies as much in spring as in summer? Is it because the temperature and moisture of the winter make bodies resemble such a season in quality? It is necessary that they become moist, relaxed, and loosened. Since these things are so, they can easily congeal and harden in a cold and dry spring. Therefore, pregnant women who are near their time of delivery are endangered at the onset, namely in the manner of heating and becoming crude. This thing is called sideratio a sudden blight or stroke, which that dry coldness commits, being altogether impatient of excreting humor. But infants whom they carry are born weak and harmed because of the excessive coldness. For it happens that those who are born then in clear weather have been kindly and well-constituted and nourished within the parent. But for others, since the phlegm has not been purged by the vice of its excess—which happens when the spring shows itself to be tepid—but has been forced and stood still by the cold, when the warmth arrives, it liquefies by the force of the summer if they are bilious and dry, for their bodies do not have a moist, but a filthy nature. Indeed, the humors are excited, but they are thin. Wherefore, dry eye infection affects them badly. If, however, phlegm abounds, hoarseness and distillations arise in the lungs; women are twisted by intestinal difficulties because they are naturally moist and cold. Stupor renders the elderly astonished, when the universally dissolved humor has settled, and from that weakness of natural heat, it has congealed.

Why, if the summer was dry and northern, is the autumn, by contrast, moist and southern, and the winter that follows...