A PHYSICIAN'S REPORT OF A CASE. 81 



The matter flowing down into the lungs is serous, limpid, 

 watery, pituitous, and sweet or insipid. If it were acrid or 

 salt, the lungs would ulcerate, and the disease would become 

 tabes, or what the Greeks called phthoe. Thin at first and 

 in small quantity it is expelled by violent coughing. Stirred 

 by the cough, broken and divided by the expired air, the 

 matter flows back into the lungs, afterwards digested and 

 somewhat thickened half thick, as it were it is expec- 

 torated copiously by stronger efforts of the chest with 

 gentler coughing. Being again reduced to a small quantity, 

 if it is thick and got rid of slowly it is expelled only by the 

 most violent efforts, because the too tenacious humour 

 adheres to the lungs and does not even reach the throat. 

 The consequence is dyspnoea, or difficulty of breathing, with 

 stertor. Afterwards, when the obstruction has been over- 

 come by which the respiration is made unusually great and 

 vehement, and frequent (which is the cause of increased 

 heat), there is a hot and burning breath out of the mouth, 

 which causes the air to be rarer than is proper for health, 

 and insufficient even when the chest is very much dilated. 

 The arterial pulse is soft, small at the beginning of the 

 attack, frequent and irregular, showing the constriction and 

 pain in the respiratory parts, and the increase of the body's 

 heat, for the air drawn in, on account of the narrowness of 

 the road left for it, is not enough to cool the heart and lungs." 

 [This is the main theory ; then are added a few medical 

 signs, and the writer states that the archbishop is so much 

 reduced as to desire for himself some strong help against so 

 serious a disorder.] 



" You have here the whole theory of the disease, which 

 hitherto I have laboured to assuage, and hinder from passing 

 into worse. "What remedies, what labour and industry I 

 VOL. II. G 



