Disputationis medicae de hydrope theses inaugurales LXV

II. The prokatarktikai preceding/extrinsic causes, however, or the external and evident causes are: a bad diet, accidents, percussion, excessive heating or cooling, immoderate and untimely drinking of cold water, especially after exercise, a bath, fasting, or even the heat of the sun. Likewise, excessive evacuations of every kind, as will appear more broadly from the following. Therefore, Q. Serenus rightly sang: By the fault of a corrupted liver or spleen, the bitter dropsy grows; or when the marrow is dried by fever, and greedy throats have drawn in cold liquid. Then the lymph swells inside as the vice spreads, separating the miserable skin from its own viscera.

12. With these things supposed, the investigation and description of the more proper causes of each species separately is now easy.

13. For these three forms have their origin from the defect of the three digestions in the living being, in such a way that Tympanites is generated from an error committed in the first digestion, of which the stomach is the workshop. For in this, while food is cooked less correctly due to weak heat, and is not turned into benign chyle, a large portion of it is transmuted into wind and superfluous ventosities, which, being pushed to the space of the lower belly and improper empty places, distend the belly into an elevated tumor.

14. Therefore, with Avicenna, we make the conjunct cause of this to be the excessive ventosity, though with some humidity mixed in. For no dropsy exists without a superfluous humor.

15. It follows, however, after crudities, flatulence of the belly that has not been dispersed, the distension of the veins, and pain around the navel, which, specifically, could not be overcome by any medicines before.

16. And as for the signs, by which we are led into the recognition of dropsy, they are established by physicians as twofold, namely, common and proper.