Inaugural Medical Dissertation on Blind and Open Hemorrhoids

IV. Galen l. c. fights most for MELANCHOLIC and burnt blood, and many with him, and not without cause, since it is most frequently at fault. Hippocrates 6. epidem. 24. says: To those with hemorrhoids, something flows out like black bile. But we have just seen that it cannot be admitted alone, and B. Sennertus l. c. quest. 1. chap. on hemorrhoids argues [this] more fully. Histories of such melancholic people occur all day long: see Forestus, Zacutus, Claudinus. We doubt not that the false humor of SERUM watery fluid also strenuously contributes its share here. Ambros. Paraeus, Chirurg. lib. XII. last chap. supports this, saying: Those who have hemorrhoids flow, shed blood almost mixed with yellow Serum, which gave the impetus to the blood for forward movement, and with its acrimony opened the mouths of the veins. Indeed, any acrid and biting humor, reclining to the vessels of the rectum, is able to bring about the same thing, and to excite anastomōsin vessel connection or diabrosin erosion/eating away, the causes of this evil.

V. The CHEMISTS without a doubt here accuse their own Salia salts [as being] savage, which, being predominant in the human body, sometimes have need of the work of precipitation. A Tartareous feculent humor opens vessels with no trouble: indeed, [the salt] Tartarus the crudity/sediment itself hides in our body, whatever Bertinus, lib. 3. med. chap. 11. might say. See Senn. instit. med. l. 2. part. 2. chap. 8. on humors, from the opinion of the Chemists. Paracelsus indeed has nothing singular here in his works, except that in schol. lib. 6. §. on leprosy, he asserts that the blood of hemorrhoids causes a disease similar to leprosy. Joh. Baptista van Helmont, in the book inscribed Pylorus Rector, t. 18. opines that diarrhea, griping, dysentery, and hemorrhoids arise from the disagreement of the bile and the pylorus.

VI. Among REMOTER Causes, the NATURAL ones hold the first place, which in any way dispose [the body] to such an immoderate flow, and among them are:

1. The temperament of the whole [body], or especially of the heart and liver, being hot and moist, multiplying blood, or hot and dry, burning it; whence Sennertus considers those more liable who were sanguine in youth, and in whom in adult age the blood is burnt. Likewise, the natural constitution of those vessels being more rare and lax tends toward this.