Illness of Maidens
Text: 8.466-70 Littre; translation adapted from N.Demand, Birth, Death
and Motherhood, Johns Hopkins, 1994 (retaining the confusion between
singular and plural found in the Greek text).
"The beginning of medicine
in my opinion is the constitution of the ever-existing. For it is
not possible to know the nature of diseases, which indeed it is [the aim]
of the art to discover, if you do not know the beginning in the undivided,
from which it is divided out.
First about the so-called sacred
disease, and about those who are stricken, and about terrors, all that
men fear exceedingly so as to be out of their minds and to seem to have
seen certain daimons hostile to them, either in the night or in the day
or at both times. For from such a vision many already are strangled,
more women than men; for the female nature is more fainthearted and lesser.
But maidens, for whom it is the time of marriage, remaining unmarried,
suffer this more at the time of the going down of the menses. Earlier
they do not suffer these distresses, for it is later that the blood is
collected in the womb so as to flow away. Whenever then the mouth
of the exit is not opened for it, and more blood flows in because of nourishment
and the growth of the body, at this time the blood, not having an outlet,
bursts forth by reason of its magnitude into the kardia (heart)
and phrenes (diaphragm). Whenever these are filled, the kardia
becomes sluggish; then from sluggishness comes torpor; then from torpor,
madness. It is just as when someone sits for a long time, the blood
from the hips and thighs, pressed out to the lower legs and feet, causes
torpor, and from the torpor the feet become powerless for walking until
the blood runs back to its own place; and it runs back quickest whenever,
standing in cold water, you moisten the part up to the ankles. This
torpor is not serious, for the blood quickly runs back on account of the
straightness of the veins, and the part of the body is not critical. But
from the kardia and the phrenes it runs back slowly, for
the veins are at an angle, and the part is critical and disposed for derangement
and mania. And whenever these parts are filled, shivering with fever
starts up quickly; they call these fevers wandering. But when these
things are thus, she is driven mad by the violent inflammation, and she
is made murderous by the putrefaction, and she is fearful and anxious by
reason of the gloom, and strangulations result from the pressure around
the kardia, and the spirit, distraught and anguished by reason of the badness
of the blood, is drawn towards evil. And another thing, she addresses
by name fearful things, and they order her to jump about and to fall down
into wells and to be strangled, as if it were better and had every sort
of advantage. And whenever they are without visions, there is a kind
of pleasure that makes her desire death as if it were some sort of good.
But when the woman returns to reason, women dedicate both many other
things and the most expensive feminine clothing to Artemis, being utterly
deceived, the soothsayers ordering it. Her deliverance [is] whenever
nothing hinders the outflow of blood. But I myself bid maidens, whenever
they suffer such things, to cohabit with men as quickly as possible, for
if they conceive they become healthy. But if not, either immediately
in the prime of youth, or a little later, she will be seized [by this illness],
if not by some other illness. And of married women, those who are
sterile suffer this more often."
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