Endoxa philosophica & medica

XLIV.
In the same way, the dissipation of the spirits, the extinction of heat, and the remaining affections of the forms which they enumerate, if they are diseases, must be reduced to the three aforementioned genera.

XLV.
For this reason, the διάθεσις disposition or κατασκευή constitution of both health and disease is threefold. This, if it exists complete throughout the whole body, constitutes perfect health. However, a vitiated condition cannot occupy the whole, for there is no living thing that does not contain some measure of health.

XLVI.
Moreover, just as the standard by which the cause, the body, and the urine are called healthy by the philosopher is not the same, so also the διάθεσις disposition is not predicated of the cause, the disease, and the symptom according to one nature. For the cause is called a disposition because it introduces it into the body; the symptom, because it follows the same.

XLVII.
Nevertheless, not every genus of symptoms will be called a disposition, if one does not consider the aforementioned matters so much as the permanence, which is opposed to the πάθημα affection/suffering.

XLVIII.
Therefore, it is not absurd to call sometimes the whole genus of symptoms, and sometimes only the third, by the name of dispositions.

I.
Is it not appropriate in pestilential diseases to use only a light diet, since Galen requires such a diet in acute cases, which, if it does not maintain the same strength, at least preserves it so that it is only moderately diminished? Furthermore, how far removed it is that pestilential diseases should be treated differently from acute ones, or that they should require more food due to a greater weakness of strength, so that strength instead demands abstinence—not indeed by reason of itself, but because of the vehemence of the disease, which, just as it is broken by full strength, so it gathers force in those things that are being restored, and consequently in those being distracted by the digestion of food? What of the fact that bodies afflicted by such a disease, rendered more impure, are harmed the more they are nourished?