Disputationis medicae de hydrope theses inaugurales LXV

17. The common signs are listed as these: the color of the whole body, and especially in the face around the eyes, is livid and leaden if the matter is cold, or yellow and reddish if it is hot; inflation of the eyes, feet, and sometimes even the hands, which is greatest in Hypofarca anasarca, moderate in Ascites, but in Tympania, generally only the belly swells; pain in the right or left side; insatiable thirst, or, as Avicenna names it, clamorous; prostrate appetite; difficulty in breathing; few and dry bowel movements; moderate urine, and not rarely reddish; languid fevers; sometimes one can also see hepatic dysentery, pustules exuding sanies thin, watery discharge, and some other things.

18. The proper marks, however, by which Tympanites is revealed, are these: a huge tumor of the belly, yet without weight, as in a bladder filled with wind; a strong sound like a drum or an inflated wineskin when the belly is struck by flicking fingers, which also is very hard when it is pressed; the wasting of the entire body without tumor of the feet or the whole body; relief from belching and emitted gases; a pulse that is smaller, frequent, and somewhat hard with a certain tension; the urine, if it arises from a cold cause, will appear not much tinted with the aforementioned, but having large and gross bubbles; if from a hot cause, it will be much tinted and subtle.

19. Ascites, furthermore, is made from the vice of the second digestion in the liver, when, that organ being cooled either by itself or by sympathy, the blood is not good, but serous and filled with much water, into which some spirit is also mixed, and it is generated and collected passing through the mesenteric veins terminated at the intestines into the same spaces of the lower belly, whence also fluctuations and sounds are excited in the belly as in a half-full wineskin.

20. We affirm, therefore, that the conjunct cause or matter of this is a wateriness