De venis mesaraicis obstructis ipsarumque ita affectarum curatione Theses sive Pronunciata LX

soft, such as a fleshy tubercle, and a clot; hard, such as stone, and small grains of sand.

XXI.
Antecedent causes are raw, phlegmatic, melancholic, and salty humors; but sanguine, bilious, and serous humors, when retained too long or changed, often congeal and acquire tenacity.

XXII.
From these, some have sometimes flowed down from the brain. For it often happens that phlegm, having fallen from the brain into the stomach and the intestines themselves, is sucked out by the mesaraic veins; for they imitate, as I said, insatiable leeches, providing ἀπλησίαν insatiability, as Galen calls it, "unphilosophical and measureless." And let it not seem a wonder to you, since Nature has constituted them to serve appetite, neglecting reason.

XXIII.
Otherwise, however, and more frequently, humors are gathered in them; and this in a twofold way: by ἕλκωσιν attraction/drawing or by ἀνάδοσιν regurgitation/upward distribution.

XXIV.
By ἕλκωσιν, from the vicious chylous juice being attracted, which, while it flows through the mesaraic veins tending toward the liver, adheres to them (especially the narrower ones) like mud to canals, and finally, with new matter gradually accumulating, obstructs the whole.

XXV.
By ἀνάδοσιν: when blood from a weak liver, or bile from the gallbladder, or black humor from a defect of the spleen, or other excrements of the body regurgitate into the aforementioned small veins and stop there.

XXVI.
To the antecedent causes, I also refer flatulence, the offspring of viscous and thick humor; and also ἀπεψίαν indigestion and δυσπεψίαν difficult digestion of the stomach, the common parent of all these. For, as physicians say, the second digestion does not amend the faults of the first, much less the third.