Anatomical Observations

...it easily appears that this description is general and common to all jugular glands known at that time, which a little below he calls paristhemia the region around the tonsils, just as Zwingerus explains in his tables, and the author himself, the best interpreter of his own words, declares manifestly while he says that he will treat of the glands of the entire neck. But what the ancients called the parotids were not the glands alone, but tumors observed under or behind the ears, which they otherwise named eparmata swellings and phygethla inflamed tumors. Thus, the "things by the ears," of which there is such frequent mention in Hippocrates, although when considered properly and by themselves they design rather those things that are naturally found there; if, however, the divine old man himself is consulted, he intends for something preternatural to be understood by this word. Hence, in Epidemics 1, section 3: "For those in whom the things by the ears were raised," in which place, not to mention others that I could bring forward, it is sufficiently manifest that something diseased goes by this name; namely, the same thing that Celsus and Pliny, granting citizenship to the Greek word, called a parotid. Therefore, although this was the force of the word among them, since it pertains to the subject of the disease no less than to the disease itself by its nature, it could not inconveniently be granted to the glands themselves, as is commonly done, if more and different types were not found in the same place. Also, last year, when it was already ending, when the illustrious Franciscus Sylvius was teaching daily by practicing in the hospital, he showed to the students and to others who wished to attend, among other things that he opened on given occasions, cadavers with scrofula tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis...