Selected quad for the lemma: cause_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
cause_n	body_n	disease_n	know_v	1,503	5	4.2422	3	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A86183	Deliramenta catarrhi: or, The incongruities, impossibilities, and absurdities couched under the vulgar opinion of defluxions. The author, that great philosopher, by fire, Joh. Bapt. Van Helmont, &c. The translator and paraphrast Dr. Charleton, physician to the late King.	Helmont, Jean Baptiste van, 1577-1644.; Charleton, Walter, 1619-1707.	1650 (1650)	Wing H1398; Thomason E601_6; ESTC R202434	67,180	88

Schools concerning the use of the Midrife confirmed by 8. Arguments 47. 7. Conclusions ensuing thereon 48. Why the remedies of Physicians are inefficacious and barren 49 That the means vulgarly used for the prevention and restraint of Catarrhs are meer fopperies and dreams worthy onely the heads of old women 50. Galen wholly ridiculous in his Books of the conservation of health 51. The Ignorance of the Schools right worthy our pitty and tears 52 The dissection of a living Dog hath deceived the Schools 53. A new Error concerning Lohochs or Lambativ medicaments 54. They depend on the supposition of a Falsity 55. Some probations 56. Whence the delusion of Catarrhs was first introduced 57. The refutation of an unreasonable and wild persuasion 58 What that is which imposeth upon our sense under the delusive disguise of a Destillation 59. What the second and succeeding matter 60. Mens ignorance of the Latex or fountain o● serous humors hath been the basis to the opinion of Catarrhs 61. Preoccupation 62. The torture of night 63. The inconstancy of Paracelsus 64. Those liquid parts which are not yet made communicants of vitality in our bodies hold no correspondence with the starrs 65. The marrow not accountable amongst the liquid parts of the body SEasonable it is for us now to declare that the large Catalogue of Diseases imputed to a destillation of Rheume from the head even to the extremity of the toes without any obstacle impeding the descent is an old wives fable invented by the common adversary of mankind on purpose lest the Causes of Diseases being known their Remedies might at the same time be revealed However it may be yet at lest is it hence manifested that the Schooles are even to this very day seduced by the errors of the Gentiles in the point of the Generation of Rheume its defluction manner way matter means places and organs as also of its Revulsion and Remedies For false and absurd must that superstructure be which is founded on an absurd and impossible Principle For which reason the vain and ridiculous hope which is erected upon Cauteries and Fontanels is in like manner staggered and ruined as I shall in convenient place demonstrate Nature herselfe is the sole Aesculapius of diseases and the Physician no more but her Adjutant according to that worthy Maxime of Hippocrates But the sense of that relates onely to such diseases which nature by her own single power usually cureth But when she hath been so fataly foyled that she cannot by her own strength arise again to maintain the conflict the Physician elected by the immense benignity of the Almighty Lord of Nature and in whose balance all diseases carry the same weight i. e. are equaly curable such is he who hath among a multitude of others of the same order obtained some one Vniversal Medicine remains no longer her servant but is become her Interpreter Rector and very potent Lord Let the name of my Lord Jesu be exalted to eternity who ever vouchsafeth his munificence to Little ones abjected in their own humility For the Nature of a sick man being the chiefe receiver of Morbifick impressions and the sensitive mover towards the contrary the Patient must then at least when the diseases entertained become prevalent yield to their conquering sword or at best in the future live a Calamitous death unlesse he shall be relieved and restored to his primitive integrity by the auxiliary hand of the Physician Yet is it not in the lot of every Physician to arrive at Corinth to ascend to that excellent knowledge but his onely who hath the happy qualifications of a Vocation Election Exercitation and Commission For in the lesse accomplished dayes of Hippocrates the transcendent virtues of Catholique medicines remained in the darknesse of undiscovery and in truth even in our brighter dayes they continue but jejune and eclipsed with prejudice and derision amongst vulgar Physicians upon which consideration he is deservedly to be excused in that he conceived the whole businesse of the conquest of diseases to lye upon the shoulders of Nature as being the sole protectresse of life Again I have elsewhere shewed that even from the first moment of the conception of an Embrion there is assigned to every peculiar member one Implantate or Originary Spirit as immediate president and Governour thereof and another Influent Spirit deradiant from the heart as the excieator and assistant of the former which yet is not determined to perfection nor individually disposed unlesse first subdued to a qualification requisite by the praeparatory power of the Implantate I have also taught in another place that every member enjoyes the capacity of Vegetation according to the virtue of its peculiar Ferment originally inoculated into its principles and that for this reason there can be no expectance of any transmutation conductive to a new generation unlesse by the mediation of that Ferment And from hence by naturall consequence we may understand that all vegetation is made by the spirits and that so all debility of digestion in the members doth depend upon the diminution of the spirits and their peculiar Ferment according to that in sacred Writ My spirit the involucrum or conservatory of the Ferment shall be attenuated and therefore my dayes shortned So that a member which in its integrity affords no visible excrement must produce a large and constant source of unnatural humor when once wounded injured diminished or impeded in the vigour of its appropriate Ferment And finally it follows from hence that according to the degrees of the injury and variety of Causes inferring that injury there must be generated a difformity and dissimilitude of excrements respectively Diseases therefore have their origine not from one fountain particularly from the Head from whence the Schools wildly imagine all Catarrhs to drop down but from a single Idiopathy or proper indisposition of every part superinduced upon the topicall or domestick Ferments Thus to example Wounds long after their sanation break forth again and frequently introduce durable Vlcers and Apostems and upon change of Weather many years after their perfect consolidation fall into a reincrudescence and freshly renew their torture Thus Coughs Pleurisies Spittings of blood and Erisypelous tumors or inflammations have their set vicissitudes and after considerable intermissions reinvade For some excessive montain Cold or other Damp suddenly surprising the nightly Aer marish or uliginous Fog or malignant Fume belched from the acide bowels of Mines doth frequently with one assault so violate and ruine the Ferments of the brain or Lungs that from thenceforward during the whole after-life they become the too fertil magazines of various excrements After this manner also in the eyes ears teeth jaws c. Excrements not such as the mucous or slimy excretions of the brain are ordinarily occasioned by the irregularity or diminution of the Ferments peculiar to those parts So Coughs and Asthmas or difficulties of respiration first begin and persever by a

continued Ferment Not in sooth by reason of a viscid Phlegme dropping continually from the head but engendered in the womb of the Lungs by a violation of their domestick Ferment For the Lungs more easily submit to the invasion of any forraigne injury then the other parts of the body in regard the Lungs is of all members the first that grows old decayed and dies As is manifest from the Cough generally infesting old men and from the rattling in the throats of all dying men though they perish by any other disease and not by affections of the Lungs For this is proper to the Lungs in this respect that they continually suck in crude Aer and being neer to the heart oppressed lavishly expend their own strength and by reason of that exhaustion decay much the sooner In the first place I dissent from the Schools because I very well know this kind of vitiosity in nature to belong to the parts containing and not to the humors contained For excrementitious humors of this kind contained are certain productions which are begotten by the Archeus or vitall president of the particular parts depraved by some noxious inquination precedent In the second I dissent from them also in this point that I stand assured that this evill is topicall and primary and not communicated by Deuteropathy or consent with the head For the Coughs of old men which for the plurality discourage all hopes of restauration arise from this root that in the lowest and smallest branches of the Respiratory Artery or pipe of the Lungs there doth constantly reside such a quantity of excrement generated in the Lungs which doth not onely obstruct the tubes or conduicts but also by the contagion of its presence deprave and diminish the Local Ferment whereupon there is hourly produced a new source or supply of excrements as the plentifull maintainance of Coughs which in men once entered the calamitous confines of old age are hardly cured by remedies known to vulgar heads in regard such remedies neither arrive at the part affected nor in troth are they endowed with any restauratory faculty These kinds of excrementitious humors therefore are no other but topicall defects of the parts misaffected and every particular part hath its particular debility whether innate or acquisite from a diminution of its vegetative Ferment And thus it is evident that the various streams of excrements flowing from the various parts of the body are all derived from this one fountain On these firm grounds I apprehend first That all repetitions of Purgations in these affections are frustraneous and hurtfull in respect they levell their power onely against the productions or Effects and not against the Causes and chiefly because such viscid excrements seated remotely from the stomack are too stubborn and refractory to yield to the laxative operation of Purgers You may pleas to adde that although Laxatives may seem to have afforded ease and relief for a day or two after their use insomuch as the masse of crude and inconfected blood in the mezaraick veins being voided by stool there must of necessity succed the more sparing dispensation of blood through the body and penury of nourishment in the Lungs and by consequence a lesse quantity of excrement be rejected yet do they by substracting from the necessary aliment of the whole and by leaving behind them an evill tincture in the instruments of common digestion every day more and more infringe the universall oeconomy of the body and impugne the conserving vigour of nature This when Physicians darkly as through a veile discover and remain ignorant that they have afforded no benefit to their Patients by the exhaustion of the laudable juces of the body and the diminution of naturall vigour they at length remit them to the sober rules of Diet and kitchen physick as the onely hopefull means of their recovery and so leave them by the painfull use of Fontanels and reiterated moderate Purges to run out their remaining sands medicaly i. e. miserably By which Concession first they insinuate that wholesome and moderate diet is to be preferred to most of those unfaithfull medicaments of the shops and upon the testimony of their own unhappy experience conclude that the Patient ought to abstain from them as hurtfull and at best but rarely to be used Our wish is that now after so many destructive exhaustions of sick mens strength they would sit down contented and in the future no more attempt by the same fruitlesse means to dreigne the hopes bodies veins strength and purses of the sick At lest I wish that they would be mindfull of their own Axiome wherein they unanimously consent That the chiefest indication of the cure is to be desumed from the benefit or harme which things already used have introduced Which rule although it be worthy the blushes of learned men and onely fit for the conformity of Empyricks yet it may be wished that by the instruction thereof they would be reclaimed from the practice of their former errors and no longer in Coughs and Consumptions return to those inefficacious remedies which they have observed never to have been beneficiall to any For then would all Purgatives Phlebotomy Errhines * Apophlegmatismes * Lambatives drinks of China Zarza Sassafras Cauteries in the Coronal suture and other deceitfull remedies of the same order be wholly layed aside which are brought into use by Physicians that they might not appeare to have received their fees for nothing It is also to be wished they had suffered themselves to be instructed from their own practice that while they pointed their endeavours directly against the Ablation Revulsion Derivation and precaution of secundary Effects viz. the Excrements wept from the injured Archeus of the particular part they at the same time tacitely confessed that they neither understood their originals nor set about the Cure of them according to the just method of beginning at the remove of their primary Causes And they had farther discovered that a medical Course of Diet is but a wild languid invalid and indeed desperate kind of remedy and Kitchen Aphorismes too contemptible a militia to encounter so formidable an Adversary already entered upon the borders of life and ready to dissolve the discordant Harmony of the whole Composition by the generall diffusion of its tyranny No wonder therefore if the Common people observing the vanity of such Cures have taken occasion to create this proverbe The best physick is to take no physick More then once have I lamented out of a deep Commiseration of the hard Condition of man while I read over whole Centuries of the Councels of Physicians and chiefly their Commentaries on the 9. Rhas ad Almansorem where they run over all diseases of the body from the Crowne of the head to the sole of the foot that digging into the Center of each disease as they believe and glory and there exploring the Grandfather or procatarctick Cause thereof

the same in the Latex which being naturally insipid doth if contaminated by the contagion of any ferment admixed acquire a sensible Acidity and inherit any forreine quality or tincture devolved from the vitiosity of our aliment This Latex the Schools have wholy neglected and indeed because they confounded it with the Vrine T is a blind and rude method of exploring the secrets of nature to make no distinction betwixt the Generatum or production and the Materia ex qua or materiall cause thereof no difference betwixt the Mother and the Daughter as if the Muccus ordinarily dropping from the brain by the nostrils the salivous humidity of the jawes and tongue the Water effused betwixt the omentum muscles of the belly and the skin in the dropsie and the Vrine were all one and the same matter namely the liquor we ordinarily drink The Liver therefore being misaffected and invaded by any hostile impression if it sound a retreat to the Latex and call back the streams thereof to its own assistance doth not convert it into Vrine but makes it the material cause of oedematous * Tumors or an Anasarca a 63. I am not a person subject to such extravagancies and wild singularities as to affirme that the Pleurisie Tooth-ache and other such maladies whose tortures were insufferable were they not in some sort moderated by their acutenesse or brevity of duration are no real Entities For I too well know and lament their tyranny over us I admit them as Diseases but oppose the vulgar tradition of the causes maner means waies end or destinations of Catarrhs Those fictitious and inconsistent causes I deny and explore other more reall and probable in whose remove the direct way to the restauration of heath doth consist I acknowledge that any man upon the rupture of an Aposteme in the Lungs may die suddenly yet I positively deny that a Catarrh is the cause of this Aposteme or that death is ushered in by a Defluxion And with much more earnestnesse I deny that an Aposteme in the Lungs can be generated from vapours exhaled from the stomack and recondensed in the brain For which reason I account not a Consumption the daughter of a Defluxion of rheume upon the Lungs but the genuine issue of their own Archeus seduced into irregularity and a depraved execution of the power delegated to his administration I conced that the Gout may be praesaged a day or two before the invasion of its paroxysme from the sensation of the motion of the salt matter which runs to the joynts like a drop of scalding liquor but cannot allow a Catarrh to be the cause thereof since I know assuredly that its material principles manner of generation waies of distillation and places of concretion and collection are prodigious figments irreconcilable to truth But the Latex ordained by nature to wash away the impurities from all parts official to concoction like the river Alpheus brought by Hercules to cleanse the stable of Augeas is of itself innocent and insipid but in its course meeting with the pollutions of saline tinctures resulting from impure and inconvenient aliment it soon degenerates into hurtfull and acrimonious and breeds Apostemes Vlcers and pruriginous maladies as the Itch Scabbs c. I cannot fool my own credulity so far as to apprehend any probability in the common opinion that vapours can ascend out of the stomack into the plane of the brain be there condensed into water where is a constant actual heat and thence penetrate through the substance and double investment of the brain Nor can I shake hands with that impertinent heresie of Paracelsus that the aer drawn in by inspiration is carried down directly to the stomack and other viscera of the lower belly but allow that a very small quantity thereof is insensibly strained through the capillary perforations of the midrife For in long compression of the breath neither any considerable intumescence of the Abdomen can be observed nor doth the breath upon its efflation smell of any thing conteined in the parts below the Midrife In like manner can no vapours of Wine or other inebriative liquor arise up to the head unlesse by the Arteries * For whatever procureth vertigoes or giddinesse in the head swoonings and other intoxicating Accidents belongs to another Common-wealth then that Eutopia of vapours Nor from the Wembe can vapours be transmitted into the head however vulgar Pathologie affirmes that wild and durable perturbations of the Animall Faculties and a strong cons●pition of reason are derivatory from malignant and narcotiall exhalations arising out of the wombe For those surious motions and actions of the matrix are not to be ascribed to any sympathy dependent on the necessity of Perspirability but to the mon●machy or civil war of that peculiar Monarchy of the wombe wherein women seem to be strangled by an ascention of some certain globular body or lump up to their throat This action is a commotion or tumult of the offended spirits residing in that part or an error in the government of the Archeus or uterine President enraged to whose arbitary power all parts of the body must doe hon age and conform as I have amply explained in my Treatise called Ignota actio Regiminis For the dominion of which the Womb hath over all parts of the body is no lesse absolute or diffusive then that whereby the Testicles distinguish a Cocke from a Capon a Bull from an Ox and a man from an Eunuch as wil in the Figure of the body as the blood flesh skin and animosity 64. But in regard all those disease conceived to proceed from Catarrhs the contaminated Latex hath obtained a peculiar superintendency or domination over the other humors of the body and responds to the nature of Water therefore doe all Accidents accompanying such infirmities observe their periodicall exacerbations most toward night the influence of the Moone queen regent of all humane substances operating those vicissitudes or causing ebullitions in us at those houres And these Accidents display their hostility most upon the brain weakned by any native or acquired distemper praeceding as also upon the Nerves and Membranes as parts whose small stock of Vitall heat makes them lesse able to resist or subdue the impressions of externall Cold And hence is it that Consumptive Hydropick Gouty and decaying bodies carry an infallible Almanack in their bones presage change of weather and by the Augurie of their pains are sorewarned of ensuing tempests which I have for that reason Christned Tortura Noctis the torture of night It is my serious V●inam and may be many others that this way of prognostication had not cost us so deare as the sufferance of such intolerable anguish and anxiety For almost every week observes unto us that men once inured to weare the fetters of the Gout or tainted with any imperfection of the lungs yea such as are onely troubled with cornes on their feet are suddainly awakened out of

they ever and anon lay the blame on some one singular distemper either naturall or acquired but yet with such a reserve of uncertainty that they dare not precisely determine whether they ought to account that distemper for the disease or onely for the Antecedent Cause of the disease about which they Consult But to prevent mistake and to be sure of the right generally in all infirmities they accuse both heat and cold For example in most they cry out upon a Frigidity of the stomack either solitary or combined with an excessive Heat of the Liver whence they foretell Catarrhs to be engendered and maladies of those parts upon which such rheumes shall be rained downe and this hint they pursue unto the exploration of the nature not onely of very many Internall but also of most Externall and Cutany defects And with such Theorical and Practical decretals do the schools season the brains of their Disciples For thus are infirmities of the eyes ears jawes tongue teeth chest arms loyns and thighs charged upon the account of Catarrhs Thus have Coughs Consumtions difficulties of respiration Pleurisies Inflammations of the Lungs Apoplexies Palsies suddain Deaths Impostumes Spittings of blood found their pedigrees deduced from Distillations Thus finally is the stomack infested with Vomiting Nauseounesse dejection of Appetite and debility of Concoction as also the Liver and Spleen become misaffected For crude and indigestible Phlegme being dropped downe from the retort of the Head Obstructions Hardnesses Dropsies Apostems Schirrous tumors Fevers torments of the bowels c. are listed under the conduct of Catarrhs To which Epidemick tradition of Catarrhs Paracelsus though otherwise above modesty triumphing in his invention of Tartars and the 3 first Hypostaticall Principles * doth frequently subscribe and alwayes openly acknowledge the name of Defluxion flussen staggering into self-contradiction under the drunken guidance of that great Lady Incertitude And this fabulous scene of Defluxions which indeed is very well worth our serious tears do the Schools so polish and trim up and deliver from hand to hand down to posterity that it now dares plead prescription and usurpe the sacred dignity of truth yea common Idiots by their own infirmities made passive Physicians tire my ears with a tedious lecture of their Catarrhs Whereupon since it is a taske extremly difficult and such as my Genius abhorrs to root out a customary doctrine from the minds of men unacquainted with more rationall wayes of learning and in the place thereof implant the seeds of solid truth chiefly when vulgar heads are of that temper that like new vessels they hardly part with that odour wherewith they were first seasoned it is my custome even among persons of honour to affect silence not to preach upon the disease or its Causes several kinds and remedies but quietly concealing my detestation of the easie theory of the Schools and dissembling an ignorance of all go away as consenting to whatever hath been said Yet in some places I adventure to leave a hint that I am otherwise instructed that Fools are not constellated to a capacity of medicinal Principles nor my selfe to be their Paedagog At best I cannot but admire that no man hath hitherto after so long a revolution of time ever discovered and made animadversions on the palpable and superlative ignorance of Physicians but that the grey-haired dreams of the Grecians have drawne the whole Christian World after them into a servitude * that is ridiculous lying and pernicious to humane society To particular they generally conclude that the head from whence their Nilus of Defluxions doth originally spring is a Cold Distemper of the stomack and an hot distemper of the Liver and that the greatest part of mankinde is in subjection to this tyranny The manner of its generation they deliver thus That the stomack incessantly during the whole act of Concoction receiving an accesse of immoderate heat from the Liver must of necessity all that while send up whole clouds of vapours into the braine and that by reason the brain is by its native temperament Cold and set like a cover over a boyling pot or the head of an Alembick in the highest region of the body all those vapours that ascend into it are againe condensed into Water Which since according to the propensity of its nature it must tend downwards doth afford an ample source to distillations and a generall maintainance to most diseases That if this torrent fall down upon the eyes ears palate teeth c. those parts have very good reason to bewaile and with plenty of rheume lament their unkinde destiny in being so neer neighbours unto and lying within reach of this tyrant the Brain but if upon the Lungs it is quickly the inevitable occasion of Coughs Difficulties of respiration and in fine of Consumtions of palpitations or tremblings of the heart and so of immature death But if the stream be turned upon the stomack then doth the stomack suffer the just punishment of its former distemper by admitting debility of Concoction Crudities Vomits Orexies * or insatiate Appetites Swounings fainting Pains of the mouth of the stomack Obstructions Laskes durable Fluxes of the belly violent ejections of Choler upward and downward fits of the Colick Atrophies or universall leanesse from decay of Nutrition Dropsies Schirrous tumors and all other defects of the instruments officiall to common Digestion yea Fevers Putrefactions of the blood in the veins as also stones of the Spleen * Kidneys and Bladder have their ordinary materials from the slime of this Defluxion That if these rivulets creep into the inmost closets of the brain then suddain death Apoplexies and Palsies immediately ensue but if in the hinder part of the head by the neck they chanee to wander into the Nerves Arteries and Muscles then must Gouts Palsies Pleuresies and Convulsions of the receiving parts unavoidably be introduced yea all Chirurgicall defects as Pains Apostems and the numerous progeny of Vlcers do they father upon Catarrhs That if this deluge be not evacuated and dreigned by some of the forementioned sluices but becomes a standing pond from whose oppression the brain is not able to deliver it self neither by the Aquaeducts of the nostrils nor the laborious pump of Coughs Oh! then instantly follows a stupid drousinesse an inexpugnable propensity to out sleep Endymion * Catoches a Lethargy Vertigo Apoplexy losse of Memory and perdition of Sences For besides these forementioned distempers of Heat and Cold and Defluxions necessarily resulting from thence the Books Orations Councels Conversations Chairs and Practices of Physicians sound of nothing and so the whole bulk of the Art of healing seems now a dayes to be moved upon the slender hinges of Purgations Phlebotomy Scarifications Baths Sweatings Cauteries and in short upon no other then the diminutions of strength and emaciations of the body or exsiccations of Rheumes To which end they impose upon their Patients the decoctions of the roots