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A suppuration is produced many ways(10); for if fevers unattended with pain continue long without any manifest cause, the disorder is transferred upon some particular part: but this happens only in younger people; for in the elderly, a quartan ague is the common consequence of such a disease. A suppuration also happens, if the præcordia being hard and pained have neither carried off the patient before the twentieth day, nor an hæmorrhage from the nose has ensued; and this holds chiefly in youths, especially if in the beginning of the distemper they had dimness of the eyes, or pains of the head: but then the abscess forms in the lower parts of the body. But if there be a soft tumour in the præcordia, and it has not ceased within sixty days, and the fever continues all that time, then the abscess forms in the superior parts: and if there is not a discharge of blood from the nose(11) in the beginning, it breaks out about the ears. And as every tumour of long standing generally tends to suppuration, so one, that is seated in the præcordia is more likely to have that issue, than one that is in the belly: and one, that is above the navel, than one, that is below it. Also if there is a sense of lassitude in a fever, an abscess is formed either in the jaws, or the joints. Sometimes too the urine continues long and thin, and crude, and the other symptoms are good: in this case for the most part an abscess is formed below the transverse septum (which the Greeks call diaphragma). If a peripneumony is removed neither by expectoration, nor by cupping, nor bleeding, nor a proper regimen, it sometimes gives rise to some vomicæ, either about the twentieth day, or thirtieth, or fortieth, and even sometimes about the sixtieth. Now we must date our reckoning from that day, in which the person was first taken with the fever, or seized with a horror, or felt a weight in the part. But these vomicæ are generated sometimes in the lungs, sometimes about the ribs. Where the suppuration is seated, it raises a pain and inflammation, and there is a greater heat there: and if one has lain down upon the sound side, he imagines it loaded with some weight. And every suppuration, that is not yet visible, may be known by the following signs: the fever does not wholly intermit, but is more mild in the day-time, and increases at night, there is plentiful sweating, an inclination to cough, and hardly any thing brought up by it, the eyes are hollow, cheeks red, the veins under the tongue white, the nails of the hands crooked, the fingers, especially their extremities, hot; there are swellings in the feet, difficulty in breathing, loathing of food, pimples breaking out over the whole body. But if the pain, cough, and difficulty of breathing have come on immediately at the beginning, the vomica will break before, or about the twentieth day. If these have begun later, they must of course increase; but the less quickly they have appeared, the more slowly will they be removed. It is common also in a severe distemper for the feet, hands, and nails to turn black: and if death has not followed, and the other parts of the body are restored, yet the feet fall off.

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