046 A DISSERTATION ON THE EPIDEMIC CHOLERA. 
ascribing it to indigestion and to chills, and recommending warm 
clothing and warm spicy medicaments; hence his practice must 
have been eminently successful. Neither does he make much 
mention of bile in it: in one part, indeed, its presence in the or¬ 
gans of digestion is expressly denied by him. {Edit. Anderna- 
chicB Rheriensis, lib. vii, cap. 14.) 
Calius Aurelianus, De Acutis Morbis, lib. iii, cap. 19, is 
under great difficulties as to the origin of the word cholera, but 
throws no new light upon the subject, and most fully supposes 
it the consequence of a redundance of the bile ; and all his rea¬ 
sonings are full of those imaginations which such a doctrine na¬ 
turally leads to, and are hardly worthy of a repetition here. 
Araeteus, De Morbis Acutis, lib. ii, cap. 6. His treatment 
and views are evidently confused, and without any clear concep¬ 
tion of the nature of the malady, or of what he ought to do with 
it. What there is of good in his book is evidently copied from 
the writings of Celsus, of which it is very much a commentary. 
He is full of the notion of a redundant bile, and of the necessity 
of its evacuation. 
Exactly at what period of time the word morbus became first 
added to this disease I am not aware, or wherefore it was done, 
as it appears to be gratuitous and unnecessary. It was, perhaps, 
added under the pretence of separating this disease from those 
affections of the mind termed choler, or choleric, angry passions 
or temperaments, or of distinguishing it from the mental affec¬ 
tions which the Greeks termed melan choli. Whatever the motive 
may have been, the addition certainly gave it a more sounding 
and terrific effect, and especially when attached to one of the 
most awfully sudden and fatal of human maladies ; and the 
Latins, in translating melancholi by atrabiliaris, thus made it 
wholly a bilious disease, and left it in no equivocal sense but as 
originating in black bile. 
The first use of this expletive addition that I noticed in the 
course of these researches was found in the Latin translation of 
Avicenna, the Arabian physician, printed at Venice in the year 
1607, though it is possible its use might have been introduced 
still earlier. There is not much in Avicenna upon this disease 
that is at all satisfactory ; it is but a rambling sort of copy from 
the Greek and Latin physicians. 
I am now led to open the volumes of some of our more modern 
and recent writers upon this subject, as it will afford me, without 
much prefatory detail, the opportunity of introducing some novel 
views on this subject, which I have some time entertained, and 
which respect the nature and also the proper classing of this 
complaint, and so introduced will remove the necessity of a more 
lengthened disquisition in explaining those opinions. 
