124 Ulisse Aldrovandi

...of the lips, ranula, inflammation of the tonsils and the uvula—including its relaxation—impeded speech, tumors, and *trichiasis* of the tongue. Regarding this last condition, Schenck believed it afflicted people of the sort who are said to have "hairy hearts." Added to these are gum abscesses and scurvy, a disease common among Germans near the Baltic Sea, characterized by rotting gums and foul-smelling breath. We should also mention toothaches, the blackening or paleness of teeth, difficult teething, and the eruption of teeth in the palate, which Pliny notes. Eustachius also recorded a Roman woman with a tooth growing near the opening of her palate; likewise, he mentions another woman living in the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Gubbio, in whose palate a tooth appeared in her tenth year.

The neck and thorax are affected by catarrh, quinsy, shortness of breath, asthma, loss of voice, pneumonia, hydrothorax, pleurisy, consumption, empyema, and heartburn—sometimes caused by stones forming in the heart, as observed by Schenck. Other conditions include fainting, an excess or lack of milk, breast abscesses, foul-smelling armpits, and a distressing cough. Schenck sometimes observed this cough to be produced by small creatures resembling flies born in the windpipe and lungs.

Furthermore, a person's health is compromised when the various parts of the lower abdomen are affected, especially in cases of indigestion, stomach pain, belching, bloating, hiccups, nausea, vomiting, bulimia, pica, immoderate thirst, griping pains, worm infestations, and the colic, iliac, or celiac passions. There is also lientery, diarrhea, dysentery, and *cordapsus*—a lethal disease where feces are vomited. Nevertheless, Schenck mentions several people who, without risking their lives, rejected suppositories and enemas through the mouth. We ourselves knew a young man from Bologna, still healthy today, who two years ago suffered from a double tertian fever and would vomit up his enemas shortly after receiving them.

To these are added dropsy, whether it be ascites, tympanites, or anasarca. According to Schenck, a man suffering from ascites lay ill for a long time; his wife, resentful of the long duration of the illness and the heavy expenses, decided to do away with the patient using poison. To this end, she gave him the powder of a toad burned in a pot, but the patient, after passing a great deal of urine, began to feel better. To finally end the patient’s wretched life with death, she gave him an even larger dose of the powder; however, the sick man passed an even greater quantity of urine and recovered, contrary to his wife's expectations. Indeed, a toad split open and applied to the region of the kidneys has the property of driving out the water of dropsical patients through the urinary tracts.

If we continue through the series of diseases of other parts, we come to nephritis, obstruction of the spleen, and scirrhus; likewise, weakness of the liver, jaundice, cachexia, and that hepatic condition where the sufferer—as described in Plutarch—obsessively watches and hunts domestic mice. We add weakness of the loins, which Festus called lumbago. Nor should we omit hemorrhoids, anal abscesses, fissures, condylomas, and imperforations.

Dodoens recounts the story of a girl born with a closed anal passage who expelled excrement through her genitals. Likewise, Benivieni records many born with a closed anus, just as happens today, which are often corrected by surgery. However, it should be noted that, in the opinion of Dodoens, infants are sometimes born imperforate because flesh grows deep within the anus; this error of nature cannot be corrected by any skill. But when only a membrane covers the opening, the infant is saved and lives once this is cut with a sharp scalpel.

Next are the diseases of the genitals and bladder, namely the loss of virility, distortion of the penis, phimosis of the prepuce, satyriasis, gonorrhea (with or without priapism), nocturnal pollution, inflammation of the bladder, bladder stones, involuntary urination, burning of the urine, dysuria, ischuria, and strangury. Regarding this condition, Dodoens tells a wonderful story of a ten-year-old boy who did not pass urine for seven days because his passages were blocked by phlegm, but eventually emitted it from the anus. Although the intestine is of a solid substance and the bladder is not at all porous, nature—doing what seems impossible—dilated those pathways for the patient's survival. Finally, we add diabetes, concerning which Schenck reports that in the year 1481, an eighteen-year-old girl urinated thirty-six pounds every single day, even though her food and drink did not exceed six pounds in weight. Thus, in the space of sixty days during which the disease persisted, she passed two thousand one hundred and sixty pounds of urine