... Theses de pleuritide

is caused by pure exuberant blood, and the pleurisy becomes mild, not difficult to cure. If it is generated from bile, it is not so easily removed. It is quite dangerous if it has melancholic humor as its cause. If it proceeds from phlegm, it holds a middle ground.

XXIII.
A greater abundance of sinful pathological blood is removed with more difficulty, a lesser amount more easily. Through the material slightly putrefying, the inflammation is almost always led to suppuration, and once rupture occurs, if the pus is not expectorated within a space of 40 days, the patient dies. If, however, the putrefaction becomes significant, the pleurisy is rendered lethal: putrid matter impacted in the membrane threatens corruption, while thicker matter threatens a scirrhus hardened tumor.

XXIV.
There is less danger from the attraction of matter than from its transmission. If the patient expectorates on the third day, the pleurisy does not exceed the fourteenth; if before the third, not the eleventh; if by the fourteenth day nothing has been rejected through sputum, suppuration must be expected. Sputum that is foul and black is the worst of all.

XXV.
What Galen writes in general about treating inflammation can also be transferred to the treatment of pleurisy. For this is excited just like that, whether from an influx of humors or a collection of matter that occurred gradually. Just as, therefore, the proper treatment of those is evacuation, so also must the treatment of this begin with the evacuation of the matter.

XXVI.
Moreover, with Hippocrates and Galen advising it, evacuation should first be attempted in those areas that relax the skin, so that the matter may transpire more easily, and with those things that attenuate and disperse the matter enclosed in the affected place. For it will happen that, with the help of these, some portion of matter is drawn out from the affected place, the part is distended less, and consequently is not tormented by such vehement pain; then, with the remaining parts also being gradually consumed, complete health is recovered.

XXVII.
The remedies that achieve this are, first, more liquid fomentations, then those that are more consistent, and finally the most arid ones. The use of these ought to be such that in bilious and acrid matter we use the first type of fomentation; in thicker and more viscous matter, the second; in thin...