Inaugural Medical Dissertation on Blind and Open Hemorrhoids

X. The formal reason of the BLIND ONES, which holds the place of the Genus, is a Tumor of the vessels of the anus, or an intumescence from thick and melancholic blood, a disease surely composed of intemperance with matter, and increased magnitude. Exquisite pain is joined to these, as a symptom whose reason will be rendered below.

CHAP. III.

SUBJECT.

I.

The SUBJECT, or the Part affected on both sides, is the Vessels of the anus, which Fabricius ab Aquapendente long ago judged should rather be called by this name than hemorrhoidal veins, in Operat. Chirurg. fol. m. 107. chap. on hemorrhoids, and he subjoined the reasons therein. Since, however, those Vessels are not of one kind, which shed the said blood or retain it within themselves, it seems worth the effort to recount summarily, before all else, the natural constitution of Hemorrhoids from Anatomical foundations, so that their origin and progress, and hence their preternatural constitution, may become better illuminated, lest we go blind in the middle of anatomical light after the manner of the Andabatae gladiators who fought wearing helmets without eye-holes. Let us briefly pursue this institution according to the mind of both the ancients and the moderns.

II.

It is known to any beginner in the art, or ought to be, that every kind of vessel carrying blood in our body is constituted double, namely Veins and Arteries. There are two trunks of the veins, [those of] the gate portae, and [those of] the hollow vein cava. The trunk of that Gate vein (by the tenor of ancient doctrine)—which is devoted most of all to the nutrition of the parts of the lower belly—is distributed into various branches, [the] gastroepiploic suspensory, intestinal, cystic, gastric, splenic, and finally Mesenteric. This last, the right [side] being otherwise and larger (with respect to the splenic) is divided again into four shoots, of which the first, retaining the name of the genus, is called mesenteric, the second Hemorrhoidal, the third cecal, the fourth colic; the denomination being taken from the parts which it washes.

From these, therefore, comes the Internal Vein just now called Hemorrhoidal (which however itself also sometimes changes its place of birth, arising near the beginning of the splenic branch, as noted once by Casserius and three times by Veslingius, against Robert Fludd of Fluctibus), and it proceeds more backward toward the coccyx, inserted according to the length of the rectum, and finally is inserted into the membranous substance of the anus with its offshoots; in which place it is also joined to the external hemorrhoidal, arisen from the hypogastric branch of the Vena Cava. The office assigned to it from ancient times was to nourish the extreme rim of the rectum with thick and suitable blood, and, through the abuse of nature, to purge through the same, as an evacuator of bad humors, melancholic blood especially; thus, flowing naturally, it would resolve and prevent many sicknesses, [while] suppressed or flowing too much, it would induce many. Whence Vesalius l. 3. chap. 5. on the fabric of the human body testifies that he found this vein in a certain person suffering from this flow to be thicker than a finger and swollen with blood. And that these were the only veins from the Gate known to the ancients as hemorrhoidal is the opinion of most learned men, Hieron. Fabr. ab Aquapend. l. c. and Joh. Riolanus, Anthropograph. lib. II. chap. 17. fol. 104. whom nevertheless Dr. Sennertus refutes in L. III. Medical practice. part. 5. sect. 1. on hypochondriac affections, chap. 6. p. m. 530.