Chapter 7: On chronic diseases

3. _Scotoma_ took its name from an accidental quality, because it brings a sudden darkness to the eyes along with a whirling (_vertigo_) of the head. Now there is a whirling as often as the wind rises and starts the dust going round and round.

4. So too in man’s head the air passages[286] and the veins produce a windiness from the resolving of moisture[287] and make a whirling in his eyes whence _vertigo_ is named.

[286] _Arteriae._ Compare “Sanguis per venas in omne corpus
diffunditur et spiritus per arterias.” Cicero, _N. D._, 2, 55,
138.

[287] Referring to the idea that the elements could pass into one
another. See p. 60.

5. Epilepsy took its name because while seizing the mind it also holds the body. For the Greeks call seizure ἐπιληψία. And it comes from the melancholy humor whenever it becomes abundant and has turned toward the head. This disorder is also called _caduca_ (the falling sickness), because the sick man falls and suffers from spasms.

6. The common herd call these also _lunatici_ because their madness[288] comes upon them according to the course of the moon....

[288] Du Breul has _insania daemonum_.

Chapter 8. On diseases that appear on the surface of the body.

11. Leprosy is a scaly roughness of the skin, like _lepidus_ (pepper-wort), whence it took its name, and its color now turns to black, now to white, now to red. On the body of a man leprosy is diagnosed in this way, if a varied color appears here and there between sound parts of the skin, or if it spreads everywhere in such a way as to make all of one unnatural color.

12. The _morbus elephantiacus_[289] is so called from the resemblance to an elephant, whose naturally hard and rough skin gave the name to the disease among men, because it makes the surface of the body like the hide of an elephant; or it may be because it is a great disorder, like the animal itself from which it has derived its name.

[289] A kind of leprosy.