Disputationis medicae de hydrope theses inaugurales LXV

Aphorism II, in which place that divine Hippocrates named this xērouderpsa dry dropsy. In Nicander’s Alexipharmaca antidotes, it is a tympanōeis udrops drum-like dropsy.

6. Askītēs ascites truly received its denomination apo tou askou from the wineskin, because in those afflicted by it, the entire region of the belly, full of a certain collection of watery and serous humor exuding into the space of the peritoneum, epiploon omentum, and intestines, represents an inflated wineskin.

7. The third species is anasarkē anasarca, which is also uposarka under the flesh, epsarkidion little flesh-swelling, and leukophlegmatia white phlegm/dropsy; to Aetius, it is sarkitēs fleshy dropsy, and commonly called aqua intercus water under the skin properly, named apo tēs sarkos from the flesh, since in it, the humor is diffused into the skin and the fleshy kind of the whole body, as we shall see more fully below.

8. The common cause of all these species, according to Celsus, is an excessive abundance of humidity, because of which even ulcers do not easily heal in these patients, a fact which Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna also confirm.

9. But the proēgoumenē primary cause is the weakness of the liver, by which the faculty of making blood, called haimatōsis hematosis, is vitiated or perishes; the primary instrument of this is the liver, and the whole body is cooled.

10. Nor, however, is it necessary that dropsies are always excited only because of a primary affection of the liver. For they can also occur when the liver is affected by the sympathy of other neighboring parts or those having a consortium with it, such as the stomach, the spleen, the mesenterion mesentery, the smaller intestines, the jejunum, the kidneys, the uterus, the transverse septum diaphragm, the lungs, etc. For from all these, and indeed from the entire body, the evil is often communicated to the liver, as Rhasis, Paul, Serapion, Alexander, and countless others testify.