ioo Greek Medicine 



delirium, a common end of continued fevers such as, for instance, 

 typhoid. The description closely resembles the condition 

 known now in medicine as the * typhoid state '. Incidentally 

 the case contains a reference to a type of breathing common 

 among the dying. The respiration becomes deep and slow, as 

 it sinks gradually into quietude and becomes rarer and rarer 

 until it seems to cease altogether, and then it gradually becomes 

 more rapid and so on alternately. This type of breathing is 

 known to physicians as ' Cheyne-Stokes ' respiration in com- 

 memoration of two distinguished Irish physicians of the last 

 century who brought it to the attention of medical men. 1 

 Recently it has been partially explained on a physiological basis. 

 We may note that there is another and even better pen-picture 

 of Cheyne-Stokes respiration in the Hippocratic collection. It 

 is in the famous case of ' Philescos who lived by the wall and 

 who took to his bed on the first day of acute fever '. About 

 the middle of the sixth day he died and the physician notes that 

 ' the respiration throughout was like that of a person recollecting 

 himself and was large and rare '. Cheyne-Stokes breathing is 

 admirably described as i that of a person recollecting himself '. 

 Such records as these may be contrasted with certain others 

 that have come down from Greek antiquity. We may instance 

 two steles discovered at Epidaurus in 1885, bearing accounts of 

 forty-four temple cures. The following two are fair samples 

 of the cures there described : 



4 Aristagora cf Troizen. She had tape-worm, and while she 

 slept in the Temple of Asclepius at Troizen, she saw a vision. 



1 John Cheyne (1777-1836) described this type of respiration in the 

 Dublin Hospital Reports, 1818, ii, p. 216. An extreme case of this condition 

 had been described by Cheyne's namesake George Cheyne (1671-1743) as 

 the famous ' Case of the Hon. Col. Townshend ' in his English Malady, 

 London, 1733. William Stokes (1804-78) published his account of Cheyne- 

 Stokes breathing in the Dublin Quarterly Journal of the Medical Sciences, 

 i846,ii, p. 73. 



