Book 2
1
As regards the various times of life, children and adolescents enjoy the best health in spring, and are safest in early summer; old people are at their best during summer and the beginning of autumn; young and middle-aged adults in winter. At these periods should any indisposition arise, it is very probable that infants and children still of tender age should suffer from the creeping ulcerations of the mouth which the Greeks call aphthas, vomiting, insomnia, discharges from the ear, and inflammations about the navel. Especially in those teething there arise ulcerations of the gums, slight fevers, sometimes spasms, diarrhoea; and they suffer as the canine teeth in particular are growing up; the most well-nourished children, and those constipated, are especially in danger. In those somewhat older there occur affections of the tonsils, various spinal curvatures, swelling in the neck, the painful kind of warts which the Greeks call acrochordones, and a number of other swellings. At the commencement of puberty, in addition to many of the above troubles, there occur chronic fevers and also nose-bleedings. Throughout childhood there are special dangers, first about the fortieth day, then in the seventh month, next in the seventh year, and after that about puberty. The sorts of affections which occur in infancy, when not ended by the time of puberty, or of the first coitions, or of the first menstruations in the females, generally become chronic; more often, however, puerile affections, after persisting for a rather long while, come to an end. Adolescence is liable to acute diseases, such as fits, especially to consumption; those who spit blood are generally youths. After that age come on pain in the side and lung, lethargy, cholera, madness, and outpourings of blood from certain mouths of veins which the Greeks call haemorrhoids. In old age there occur breathing and urinary difficulties, choked nostrils, joint and renal pains, paralysis, the bad habit of body which the Greeks call cachexia, insomnias, the more chronic maladies of the ears, eyes, also of the nostrils, and especially looseness of the bowels with its sequences, dysentery, intestinal lubricity, and the other ills due to bowel looseness. In addition thin people are fatigued by consumption, diarrhoea, running from the nose, pain in the lung and side. The obese, many of them, are throttled by acute diseases and difficult breathing; they die often suddenly, which rarely happens in a thinner person.
