Aphorisms of Hippocrates

the Book on the Manner of Living in Acute Diseases in these words: "Whoever uses barley-water in these diseases, let them not permit the vessels to be emptied on any day, and let them not intermit, unless it be necessary to intermit because of a medicine or the use of an infusion through a clyster." Then he adds: "Abundance is sufficient, so that they may ingest something for the sake of custom, and so that a great emptying of the vessels may not occur." And a little below: "I assert it to be better to begin to sip immediately, than to begin to sip already having emptied them on the third or fourth day." And below, while he treats of the custom of lunching or dining, he says: "He who, contrary to custom, has taken food once in the day, if when he has emptied the vessels all day, he has dined as much as he was accustomed to, it is likely that if then when he was without lunch he pained and became sick, and when he dined he was worse, he will be burdened much more." And he adds: "It is not permitted to make the emptyings of the vessels untimely, nor most vehement, nor to exhibit foods when diseases are urgent and consist in inflammation." In the Book on Joints, however, in that part of the book in which he has discourse concerning the fracture of the ribs, he says: "If a continuous fever has not seized them, it is even worse for the vessels to be emptied through fasting in these than if they were not emptied. It also induces greater pain, and fever, and cough: for moderate repletion of the belly is the straightening of the ribs. But emptying makes the ribs pendulous, and afterward the pendulosity induces pain." We could also bring forward many more places, if our discourse were not drawn out into length. But furthermore, those words which he adds in this aphorism confirm us in this opinion, and they are these: "One must look to the region, and time, and age, and diseases, in which it may be suitable or not: for, after he has shown in the following aphorism what the emptying of the vessels ought to be like, by comparing it to the best of athletes, he