Inaugural Medical Dissertation on Blind and Open Hemorrhoids

FORM, while hemorrhoids err by excess or defect; the former are called OPEN, the latter BLIND. Their descriptions are proposed above, chapter 2. Compare Galen, Introduction/Isagoge; Paul, book 3, chapter 59; Aëtius, book 14, chapter 5, and Gorrheus, Medical Definitions, fol. 11, although blind ones are sometimes called symptoms of the open ones, as Mercatus and Pereda, book 1 on the cure of diseases, chapter 52, in the notes have it.

The OPEN ones again have a large or small gap, or flow with more or less blood, and flow more frequently or for a longer time. BLIND ones are either completely closed and suppressed, or they flow in a diminished way; they occur either with an influx of blood or without an influx, with the humors turned elsewhere.

To this pertain those five differences that the Author (Galen or whoever else) proposes in his book of medical definitions, sought from quantity, quality, and place: namely:

1. By reason of magnitude, hemorrhoids are large, small, or medium.
2. By reason of number, more or fewer.
3. By reason of figure, blind ones are called uval, moral, warty, or bladder-like, from the things to which they are likened when they swell; the causes of which are explained more fully by others.
4. By reason of constitution or manner, they are mild or malignant, cancerous or gangrenous.
5. By reason of place, they are either in the anus, the rectum, or the sphincter muscle. Whoever desires an explanation should approach the Author himself and his interpreters. It suffices for us here to have indicated their bare names.

By reason of TIME also, they open either every month (although that rarely happens), just like women’s menses (see Marcell. Donat., aforementioned work on Miraculous Medical Histories), or they return in a three-month interval, or to some they happen once or twice every year, according to the abundance of humors stimulating nature more or less. They are also recent or long-standing, to which 6 Aphorism 12 of Hippocrates pertains.

II. They are called INTERNAL or EXTERNAL hemorrhoids by a sufficiently customary name, from the SUBJECT or Place to which they adhere, of whose origin and propagation much has been said above, chapter 3.