Inaugural Medical Dissertation on Blind and Open Hemorrhoids

Venus is also the consensus of astrologers to preside over the seat and adjacent parts. Hence, those who have Saturn or Mars in Scorpio or Virgo are for the most part subject to hemorrhoids. The Magnificent Lord President has observed many people prone to the flux of hemorrhoids in whom Venus was harmed by Mars or Saturn, or both. This affection causes much trouble here if Saturn, established in the house of Venus, harms Venus, and Mars, established in the sixth house, conspires from Virgo or Scorpio. A predominant Mars is accustomed to excite flowing hemorrhoids too much, while Saturn is accustomed to excite the blind ones more. Mercury and the Moon conspiring are accustomed to increase the evil.

2. DIET, if it errs significantly in quantity or quality, has great efficacy here, especially if it is fuller than usual, or if bouts of gluttony and more frequent swilling of generous wine occur. Foods that are thick, hard, burnt, acrid, warmer, all salted, sour, and seasoned with vinegar—pertaining to this are the thoughts of Hippocrates, Book on the Regimen of Health in Acute Diseases and Galen, On the Faculties of Foods, chapter 7. Bread made from bad grain, not properly baked; beef, Galen, 3 On the Faculties of Foods; rancid and putrid meat; all things salted and hardened by smoke; sea fish, especially salted; older cheese; olives and legumes grown in swampy places; cabbage, onions, garlic, beans, and lentils.

Among drinks: thick, sluggish, mercurial, feculent, impure, or immature wines; fresh beers, pitched, less seasoned with hops; swampy, salty, or vrous waters, which are impure in themselves, or taken with food or drink.

Among medicines, these things promote this flux: stronger purgatives, drastikōtera more drastic/powerful, colocynth, scammony, and especially aloe taken more frequently, as attested by Sempione, chapter 102 on simple medicines and Mesue, On the Faculties of Simples, chapter 7, whatever Leonh. Fuchsius may say to the contrary in his book of paradoxes, chapter 1. Jul. Cas. Scaliger, Exercise 169, section 3 asserts that those who dare to deny this deserve the lash of experience. The man most practiced in every part of philosophy, Sethus Calvisius, is said to have fallen into a lethal spitting of blood from the frequent use of aloe. Compare the previous thesis 6, number 4. Diuretics and things that move the menses, given untimelily and with a more generous hand, can produce the same effect.