Treatment of dropsy

The general goal of treatment for such patients is drying and removal of excess; the sick are forced to sit in the sun, in a place where there is absolutely no wind, and or near a fire lit from dry wood, and also eat with scales and completely refuse water. They are also treated by opening the pores, often expelling urine, carefully and often removing aqueous moisture from the bottom and forcing the patients to endure thirst, wrapping them up and forbidding them even to look at the water, let alone drink it, as far as possible. If it is impossible to avoid drinking water, then it should be drunk some time after a meal and, moreover, diluted with wine or something else. Reducing the quantity and eating very tender foods is the best treatment, as is exercise, which we mentioned in the paragraph on "meat dropsy". It is useful to conserve your strength, strengthen it with fragrant perfumes and pleasantly smelling substances, as well as the smell of nutritious foods, and increase it with fragrant wine. Drinking a lot of sikanjubin for this disease is not commendable.

One of the remedies useful for such patients is vomiting, especially before meals, but also after it, at intervals of one, two or three days; this helps them a lot. Sneezing, caused by drugs blown into the nose and other means, benefits them, as it forces aqueous humor down and moves it towards the excretory ducts. As for bloodletting, it should, if possible, be avoided by anyone suffering from dropsy, except those who have become dropsy due to retention of blood, for bloodletting does not allow the organs of such people to nourish themselves when they already have little nutrition; in addition, cooling their liver due to bloodletting is harmful in the vast majority of cases. If there is a tumor, the doctor will deal with it first. If a dropsy complains about the left side, where there are many arteries, then his complaints are not caused by the tension that he feels there, since both sides are equally affected by this, and they are explained by the abundance of blood. Let them first bleed him, and then treat him the same way as he is treated for dropsy. But if the tumor is hard, then there is no point in trying to cure the waterskin dropsy that follows it. Even if you remove water in any way at least a hundred times, it will return and fill the body again.

Know that emptying with medicine is better than making a puncture or forcing liquid to ooze, since wounds in both cases are difficult to heal; bowel movements should occur at a time when there is no fever. If treatment measures sometimes dry up the dropsy, then a tumor in the liver causes it to begin again. The patient should be given fewer astringent lozenges, although they strengthen, such as barberry lozenges, especially when the nature is locked. Drying with cold dropsy should be done using all cleansing, thinning and opening means, and hot dropsy is treated in another way, which we will talk about separately.

Know that pistachio oil and almond oil both help with all types of dropsy. As for simple medicines suitable for this type of dropsy when it is cold, this is, for example, a decoction of clover, which was boiled for a long time; They give it to drink every day for two ukiyya. Or boil a sea onion rittle in four cups of wine in a clean clay pot until one third of the wine is gone, and give it to drink first with one large spoon, then increase the quantity until it reaches five spoons, and then reduce it again until it is will not return to one spoon. They also give you one uqiya to drink squeezed mint juice. One of the doctors says that you should take Spanish flies, tear off their heads and wings and throw their bodies into water sweetened with honey, then take the patient to the bathhouse and give him this medicine to drink, or he takes it with bread. However, in my opinion, this remedy is very dangerous, and the most I dare to give it to drink is one qirat with a sip of drink from well-known squeezed juices.

They say that if a patient’s body is cleansed and he drinks one himmusa teryak in mint decoction every day, twenty-one days in a row, limiting himself to one light meal per day, then he will recover. One of the doctors also claims that it is useful to give such patients goat feces with honey, or give them sheep urine or donkey urine with sumbul and honey, or round aristolochia in the amount of three dirhams in wine. And one doctor praised this remedy for them: give every day or every two days one bakilla of strained decoction of fresh dill with water. Medicines useful for dropsy include kalkalanaj and medicine with lak - especially for waterskin dropsy, as well as for any other dropsy, medicine with turmeric and especially Aburitus porridge, as well as juvarishn from iris, medicine from sea onions and drink from sea onions with Teryak. Know that teryak, medicine with turmeric and kalkalanaj are very helpful in the end of cold dropsy.

Among the remarkably useful medicines are lozenges made from resinous milkweed with the following composition: take resinous milkweed and yellow myrobalans in equal amounts. The amount for a single drink gradually increases from one and a half danaks to almost a dirham; drink them once every four days; In the intervals between doses, they give you barberry cakes to drink. Sometimes medicines are also made from rhubarb, bush, laurel drupes, fenugreek, lupine, elecampane, gentian, almond gum and galbanum; These are useful medicines. Among the means that remove aqueous humor from below are laxatives, suppositories and mainly enemas: they are closest to water, most easily tolerated by nature and are farthest from the main organs. Various methods of bathing are useful: in water from hot springs, in steam baths, in water in which diluting medicines were boiled, for example, chamomile and aromatic rush, as well as various rubbings, dressings and poultices. This also includes drinking goat's milk and milk from pregnant camels; Urine also belongs to this category. The milk of pregnant camels is suitable for waterskin dropsy, if you take it for a week with yellow cakes - first in the amount of half a dirham with half a dirham of bamboo nodules, and then more and more until it reaches one dirham. After a week, the water is removed with two dirhams of kalkalanaj, and then yellow cakes are given again for a week; This is done all the time, and the patient sometimes recovers. And the weak patient is given yellow cakes, at first only one danak. The recipe for yellow cakes is mentioned in the Pharmacopoeia, as well as kalkalanaj. For a patient who has a high fever, the milk of pregnant camels is unpleasant. They start giving him camel milk at forty dirhams and add ten dirhams every day.

As for laxatives, they should not contain anything harmful to the liver, and if the doctor is forced to resort to such a remedy, then it should be corrected. It is also not appropriate to take all the laxative at once and it is better to give it several times, because such medicine, taken at once, kills. The least harm from it is weakening of the liver. Sabur by itself is a very bad medicine for the liver; it should be kept away from the liver and given only when necessary or managed to correct it. Laxative medicines should be followed by fasting; a patient who has taken a laxative, if possible, should not eat after that for one day and one night.

After laxatives, you should also take something strengthening and slightly astringent, for example, barberry cakes or fruit juices, which have sweetness and astringent properties, to strengthen the liver, especially after taking furbiyun, wolf's bast, ushshak and the like. Then, remedies are used that correct the nature of the liver, for example, teriyak, medicine with turmeric for cold conditions and chicory juice for hot conditions. When there is fever, yellow bile should not be removed from the bottom: it in some way counteracts the aqueous humor, and the aqueous humor also needs to be removed, so a double weakening results and the strength of the liver is damaged. On the contrary, it is most appropriate to quench yellow bile and remove moisture from below, unless the bile exceeds the limit in terms of abundance; then, when removing it, limit yourself to something like myrobalans: this is an excellent laxative in such a case, just as sagapen is an excellent laxative in case of coldness of the liver. Any excess in relaxation in terms of quantity and duration is not good; in hot temperatures it is safer. Good emollients include broth made from larks and from an old rooster, especially with polypodium, dill and similar seasonings.

After the aqueous humor has been removed for about ten days with some gentle emptying means: camel milk, cheese whey and others, so that the amount of water has decreased and the swelling has become easier, it is good to cauterize the stomach so that it no longer takes water. Cauterization is carried out after two or three days of abstinence from food and refusal of laxatives, and it consists of six burns - three along, starting from the chest bone to the pubis, and three across the abdomen. And let the patient suffer hunger and thirst after this. It would be correct to give something to drink to open blockages between two laxative doses, for example, cakes with bitter almonds. As for giving milk to camels and goats, mainly Arabian camels and especially those that are fed something that removes aqueous humor, thinning and diuretic, for example, wormwood, yarrow, falafili and other such injuries, and if the nature is hot - substances, which are at the same time suitable for the liver, such as dodder, chicory and others, then do not pay attention to the words of those who say that all this is the instigation of sophists, and to the talk that the nature of milk is opposed to the cure of dropsy. On the contrary, know that this is a useful medicine, for it has the ability to gently cleanse and has a special healing property. After all, sometimes a laxative medicine is the opposite of what is required to correct a given quality of nature, but is suitable due to its special property or some other reason, for example, the ability to defecate and the like; for example, chicory is included in medicines for the treatment of liver affected by cold diseases, and scammonium resin is used for yellow gall diseases. For example, know that this kind of milk brings great benefits, and if a person remained on milk alone, instead of water and other food, he would probably be cured. This was tested on people whom chance had thrown into the lands of the Arabs, and necessity led them to such a regime, and they recovered. The milk of pregnant camels is sometimes consumed on its own, and sometimes mixed with other medicines. Some of them are used for treatment without strong heating, such as myrobalans with chicory seeds, dodder seeds and petroleum salt, while others are used for treatment with warming and thinning, such as sagapen and its seeds. And with some medications they want to delay excessive relaxation; such as, for example, acacia and similar substances. Milk is often mixed with camel urine; sometimes they limit themselves to it alone as food and drink, and sometimes they add other food. In both cases, you should check how the milk works: whether it is absorbed by the body without weakening laxes a little or removes more than it is supposed to, but to a tolerable degree, or laxes excessively, more than a tolerable degree, or it curdles in the stomach or in the passages, or leads to cooling of the liver, or leaves behind juice, either mucous or burnt due to rotting, if the milk has been subjected to

Know that the best time to give milk is before the beginning of summer. Here's a good way to feed it that we've tried many times and it helps. Foal camels drink milk after fasting for several days and nights, during which they take only very little food. If it is possible to fast all this time, then do so, but be sure to endure hunger from the previous evening. Milk is drunk fresh, immediately after milking, right there on the spot, in the amount of two ukiyya, and it is best to drink two ukiyya of milk and one ukiyya of camel urine. The patient abstains from water for several days - up to three, and the amount of urine released during urination turns out to be close to what he drinks. After this, the stomach sometimes ejects milk, which the patient drinks, and sometimes it ejects only a small amount of feces; the stomach does not spew milk only because the body has already absorbed it. And if the stomach vomits more than what the patient drinks, then they abstain from milk for one day or add something astringent to it. If nothing comes out at all, then the drinker should be wary of the milk curdling and avoid it. The same is done if less than what is drunk is erupted. In this case, you should take a medicine that will make the milk in the stomach go down, and again drink milk with sagapen or something like that. As a precaution, you should even take small amounts of sagapen pills and the like every three days: they remove the remains of milk, which may have curdled, or what originates from it. This is especially useful if the patient has sour belching and feels heaviness in the stomach.

One of the useful measures in such a case is to immediately administer an enema. In such circumstances one should also stop giving milk for a day or two and resort to poultices and bandages placed on the stomach to dissolve the curdled milk. If drinking milk does not cause anything of the kind and excretes every day not excessively, but, say, in the amount of two small jugs, then limit yourself to milk in its pure form or with sagapen and laxative pills, sagapen or others. And if the relaxation is excessive, then they stop giving milk for a day or two and then gradually begin to give it again; They give milk to a noble breed of camel, which is fed with astringent herbs. When it is milked, they immediately add to it the scale of Basri iron, crushed, washed with wine vinegar and calcined in the amount of twenty dirhams, as well as gum-bearing acacia and tarasis - five each, celery seeds - three dirhams and a bunch of erf tara, celery and rue. These remedies are left in the milk for a while, then the milk is strained and drunk, and then gradually switched to pure milk or to milk mixed with laxatives, if necessary.

As for diuretics that help in this case, you should not constantly use any one of them and it is better to move from one to another. Such medicines are, for example, mountain parsley, azhgon, mint, hoofed grass, fennel, celery seeds, tortuous gill, stinking ferula, Dubrovnik, calamus, both sumbula, wild carrot seeds, valerian, wild dill roots, asparagus and its seeds, root wild carrots and bladder cherries; they should be finely ground so that they quickly reach the convexity of the liver.

When using strong diuretics, you should use some fatty broths after them, for example, fattened chicken broth.

As for the dressings, the rule requires not to introduce a lot of drying and dissolving drugs into them, which at the same time strongly tighten and clog the pores that facilitate breathing and dissipation of excess; they should be placed only a little - so much as to preserve natural strength. If such medicines are needed, then these are sumbul, incense and sat in very small quantities; they also preserve the strength of the abdominal walls and what is between them, and make them impervious to moisture. As for the medicines for simple dressings and for complex dressings useful in this disease, we mention many of them in the Pharmacopoeia. And those that we will mention here are only tested and potent bandages. This includes the feces of cows and the feces of goats fed dry rather than fresh grass. Here is the recipe for dressing them: take a little feces of these animals and boil it in water with salt; then it is sprinkled with grated sulfur and placed on the patient’s stomach. Also: sheep feces with baby urine; also: pigeon feces, laurel drupes and “orris root”. One of the strong dressings of this kind: cow feces and goat feces, in which they put a little harbak and resinous milkweed, bind it with the urine of a camel foal and apply it as a bandage. One of the dressings is this: a split cowrie shell is stuck on the belly of a dropsy and left as it is, or the meat is first pounded together with the shell and waited until it dries and falls off. One of the good dressings is this: it is prepared from ratiya anaj, soda, elecampane and crushed incense with cow fat.

A suitable dressing for dropsy: boil fleshy figs in water and add to it one part of grated wolf bast, two parts of soda, one and a half parts of dubrovnik. Another dressing is very effective: take the resins of pine, wax, lanolin, zift, turpentine tree gum - three darakhmi each, maya, that is, styrax, mastic, sabur, saffron, the ends of the stems of wormwood, ushshak - each one darakhmi, beaver stream , sulfur, amom and the shells of a fish called sipha - half a darachmi each, pigeon feces, Babylonian cress and the foam that sticks to the reeds in the ponds, three darachmi each, a blue iris - four darachmi, a red bavrak - one darachmi; all this is mixed with medicinal chamomile oil.

If there is a tumor in the liver, then a bandage prepared from the herb sumbula, saffron, bana seeds, mastics, sweet clover, young shoots of grapes, medicinal chamomile and fragrant oils helps, and from plasters - a plaster of this kind: take marcasite, yellow sulfur, soda and ushshaka - one part each, cumin - two parts with two thirds, bind it all with wax, turpentine tree resin and wine and place it on the patient’s stomach. Also useful are a plaster with beaver stream, a plaster with wormwood, our “orris root” plaster, a plaster with furbiyun, a plaster with coloquinta pulp, a plaster prepared with Egyptian willow, a plaster with laurel drupes, a plaster made from seeds and a plaster with Chernobyl.

For powders, use calcined soda and salt, which are sprinkled on the stomach, especially after lubricating with naturally hot oil, for example, mad cucumber oil and spikenard oil. Sometimes such patients are prescribed medications that cause redness, and sometimes they are beaten on the limbs with thin rods, but this, in my opinion, is not commendable. They often hang inflated bladders from the ileum and adjacent areas, but I don’t see much benefit in this. As for puncturing the abdominal walls, know that it rarely has a beneficial effect, except on a patient with a very strong body, if he is able to do moderate physical exercise after that and tolerate thirst and decreased nutrition; If possible, do not use any other treatment before this. It would be correct to release the liquid not at once, but little by little, so that the pneuma does not come out immediately and the strength does not drop, and not to puncture an exhausted patient. Regarding the puncture procedure, Antillus orders that the patient be stood upright if he can stand, or seated in an upright position, after which the servants press on his ribs and move them downwards from the navel, and then the doctor performs the puncture. If the patient is not able to endure all this, then he is not given a puncture. And if you want to pierce, then you need to pierce below the navel to the width of three moved fingers, if the dropsy began from the intestines. If it started from the liver, then an incision is made on the left side of the navel, and if the cause comes from the spleen, then make an incision on the right side of the navel and be careful not to cut the peritoneum. On the contrary, separate the upper shell of the abdominal wall from the peritoneum a little below the incision site of the upper shell and make a small hole in the peritoneum, so that the hole in the peritoneum is below the hole in the upper shell and so that the hole in the peritoneum, after removing the tube, closes and the water would be locked up due to various hole locations. Then insert a copper tube into the opening of the peritoneum, and when you have extracted a fair amount of water, make the patient lie on his back. You should also monitor your pulse: if it starts to weaken a little, hold back water.

When you have extracted the water to the last possible extent, in a fair amount, and still have some left, then laxative drugs alone are enough to cope with this. Sometimes after the puncture they do cauterization, which we mentioned above, sometimes they cauterize with thin cauterizers in the area of ​​the stomach, liver, spleen and below the navel, and often they manage to make water flow into the scrotum and little by little remove it from the lower back with the help of a puncture. This method is successful and useful, and this is achieved by causing sneezing and using all means to divert the water downwards. In this case, you should be careful that a hernia does not form, and use remedies that do not cause any other harm. And sometimes, when there is dropsy of the testicle, the tumor is pricked with many needles so that there are many outlets for the oozing water. Often after a puncture there are stings and pains. Then they apply watering of the place where they cut and the pierced place with dill oil, chamomile oil and other emollient oils and apply medicinal dressings prepared with fenugreek, flaxseed, marshmallow seed and similar medicines; sometimes they limit themselves to hot water and oil, which is poured over the puncture site. And when the pain calms down, the bandage is removed.

As for partial emptyings for such patients with the help of medications, we will also name some of them; We have already listed these medicines, which remove aqueous humor from below, in the sections of the Book of Simple Medicines. The strongest ones are the milky sap and stems of yattu; The best way to reduce the harm from them is vinegar, apples, quinces and pomegranate seeds, especially vinegar in which they pickled or boiled quinces and the like, or left the quinces for several days, or vinegar into which they dripped their squeezed juice. As for the substance on which yattu is kneaded, for example, the milky juice of resinous milkweed and the like, then this is maybukhtaj; The yattu is mixed with it and made into pills. Sikanjubin is better than maybukhtaj, if you dilute one danak of resinous milkweed in one uqiya of sikanjubin, and especially the plant from which Faravian and Fushenj teryak is prepared - I believe that this is lagiya.

Furbiyun is a medicine that is given to drink in the amount of a dirham with the yolk of soft-boiled eggs; it has repeatedly helped the seriously ill, although there is great danger hidden in it. Burnt copper and copper dross, especially mixed with bread crumb and made into pills, are useful, as well as a herb called mandarania, squeezed juice of mad cucumber and wine in which the coloquinte pulp was soaked. Wolf's bast - and this is one of the yattu - is a strong medicine for such a case. It is corrected by soaking it in vinegar; Sometimes shikanjubin is prepared from such vinegar. Ushshaka is sometimes given to drink up to two dirhams with water sweetened with honey. Medicines closer to balance include sagapen, orris root, nettle seeds, peeled and mixed with honey, and radish leaf juice. Safer and weaker remedies are ragwort juice - half a ritla with asclepiad sugar, bladder cherry juice, nightshade juice with sikanjubin from wolf bast, as well as camel milk, specially prepared, cheese whey, reinforced with the power of "orris root", copper scale, wolf's bast and the like.

Cheese whey recipe. For one ritl of whey, add a dirham of Andaran salt and five dirhams of grated turbit. All this is carefully boiled, the foam is removed, filtered and given to drink, starting with a third of a rittl and little by little increased to a rittl; This medicine removes water without heating the nature. The best cheese whey is the one obtained from the milk of a pregnant camel, but the coldest in nature and most suitable for patients with a hot nature is the whey obtained from the milk of a goat and the milk of a donkey.

Here is one of the medicines close to this and useful for hot dropsy: quince, cut into pieces, is soaked in vinegar for three days, then pounded with the same amount of fresh wolf bast, and pounded vigorously until they are mixed, and filtered. To this add sugar, in half the amount of vinegar, boil the vinegar until it becomes thick like honey, and mix everything. Pills prepared from wolf bast seeds with asclepiad sugar sometimes have a similar effect; This is one of the medicines that is also not dangerous for hot dropsy. Of the varieties of medicinal porridge, kalkalanaj and our porridge with iron scale and wolfsbane, mentioned in the Pharmacopoeia, as well as this porridge from one of the doctors are useful: they take chicory seeds and dodder seeds - ten dirhams each, squeezed dandelion juice in dried form - twenty dirhams , squeezed barberry juice - fifteen dirhams, washed lac and Chinese rhubarb - five dirhams each, squeezed wormwood juice - seven dirhams, squeezed mad cucumber juice and coloquinte pulp - five each, agaric - seven dirhams. All this is mixed in julab and given to drink with vegetable juice. This is a good medicine, which was first mentioned by one of the ancient physicians and which was appropriated by a later physician. It is safer than kalkalanaj, and it has a strengthening power and a sharp laxative property.

As a drink, our wine from “orris root” is useful, as well as wine of this kind: take burnt copper, which is thoroughly pounded and ground, pigeon feces - miskal, rue stems - a third of this amount and a little salt for the dough and drink all this with wine. The prescribed pills are Philagria pills of this kind: copper scale, wolfsbane leaves, anise seeds - one part of each; Pills are prepared from this and given to a strong patient to drink - mithqal, and to a weak one - dirhams. They also give pills of Isaiah, pills of Bahram, pills of five medicines, pills of sagapen, pills of wolf's bast - they are excellent for waterskin dropsy, just as rhubarb pills are excellent for "dropsy of meat", pills with bdelium, pills with resinous spurge, various pills that we mention in the Pharmacopoeia, and pills of this kind: juice of resinous milkweed, squeezed juice of bitter wormwood, sumbul, turbita - each one danak, agarik, rose - each half a dirham; All this is turned into pills using nightshade juice and drunk. More good pills: take copper dross, dubrovnik, anise, in equal parts, turn it into pills and drink, starting with one darachmi, and gradually rising higher. Among the flatbreads used are flatbreads made from large laxative rhubarb, flatbreads from wolf's bast with seeds, and also flatbreads from wolf's bast according to another well-known recipe.

As for the bath, a wet bath is not advisable for dropsy and the best bath for them is a dry one; and the best of the dry ones is a bath in an oven, heated enough for a patient to enter, especially a patient with “meat dropsy.” When he enters the oven, he leaves his head outside in the cold air, so that the cold air reaches the region of the heart and lungs and cools the heart and so that the thirst does not become too strong, and his body exudes abundant healing perspiration. If the bath is wet, then from the well-known hot waters with the properties of bavrac, or sulfur, or alum, which dry out the juices, the dropsy receives great benefit at the end of the disease, especially the patient with “dropsy of meat”. He is bathed in these waters repeatedly, several times a day, and if his strength does not weaken and he is able to stay there all day, then let him do so. Sea water also belongs to this category if it is heated or hot. As for cold water and swimming in it, this is very suitable at the end of the disease. One of the advantages of hot spring water is that by bathing in it, you can provide breathing with cold outside air, which is missing in the bathhouse. And when there is no hot spring water at hand, they try to improve fresh water by mixing medicines into it or boiling in it, for example, bavrak, sulfur, ushnan, mustard, lime and other known substances similar to them; then the trouble from her is small. Such water should touch only the abdomen of a patient with waterskin or tympanic dropsy, and the whole body of a patient with dropsy of meat.

As for hot dropsy, it either follows a hot tumor, or is a consequence of a hot nature without a tumor, when such a nature is present. weakens the changing force. Redness of the urine is not necessarily a sign of this type of dropsy: sometimes such coloring occurs from the paucity of urine. Therefore, it is better to rely on other signs and then treat the patient. In both of these cases, one should completely abstain from hot medicines: they would intensify the cause of the disease!, and this would intensify the disease itself, and there would even be a great danger. We should not pay attention to those who say that dropsy can be cured only with hot medicine: it has often been cured, as we have seen ourselves and as was and was tested before us, when we and our predecessors, both from a tumor in the usual way, and from a hot one - by cooling . I saw one woman who had complete dropsy and her illness became great. And this woman began to lean heavily on pomegranates, and ate so many of them that it’s literally scary to say, and she recovered, and she herself came up with such a regime for herself and for her appetite.

At the same time, one should also keep in mind the accumulated water. After all, if you began to pay attention only to fever, it would be dangerous, but if you began to pay attention only to water, it would be a mistake. Therefore, one should carefully combine both treatment regimens, resorting to balanced drugs and counteracting the predominant disease phenomenon. Know that if you try to cure dropsy and swelling while the fever still continues, you will not succeed. The method of treatment in such cases is to use nightshade juice, bladder cherry juice, celery juice, godson juice and dandelion juice, that is, “bitter chicory”; mixed with these medications. that lakka, saffron and rhubarb with yellow myrobalans. And of necessity they also use laxatives from wolf bast and others, which we placed in the previous section.

You should think about what Galen says about the treatment of dropsy with hot dropsy; we wrote it down in his own words. Galen says: “This is how I treated one old man, our friend, from waterskin dropsy with fever and weakening of strength. I fed him with roasted goat meat, mountain and steppe partridges and other similar birds, as well as coarse bread, caris with sour seasonings, jelly, lentils with vinegar in the form of yellow lentil soup and allowed him this widely in order to maintain strength, but did not allow broth at all, except for the day when I intended to give him medicine. On such a day I allowed him to eat, zirbaj before and after the medicine; this did not increase his thirst, and I ordered him to eat zirbaj with medium-strength vinegar. I induced relaxation in the patient with such a decoction: yellow myrobalans - seven dirhams, fumes - four dirhams, wormwood herbs - two dirhams, herbs Hemp-like sapling - two dirhams, fresh chicory - a bunch, aromatic sumbula - two dirhams, chicory seeds - two dirhams, roses - two dirhams. All this is boiled in three rittles of water until one rittle remains, ten dirhams of sugar are diluted in the decoction and drunk . And I also gave him these pills: I took resinous milkweed juice and the same amount of sugar that is used to thicken the juice, and gave them before meals. Sometimes the juice of the resinous milkweed is thickened with the pulp of figs, and I gave it two or three himmuses, after which I gave the patient thickly brewed juice of unripe grapes and rhubarb and put cold bandages on his liver, as well as bandages made from pine nuts and wolf bast soaked in vinegar. As for ointments on the stomach, I used Armenian clay with vinegar and water, ointment with barley flour and millet, cow feces and goat feces, ash of oak and vines, and from time to time - bavrak and sulfur, all with vinegar. I even put a sandalwood bandage on his liver, and sometimes I put a sandalwood bandage on the liver area and a dissolving bandage on the navel and stomach. Sometimes I made him relax with rose wine, first softening the wolf's bast in it, and once I even diluted the juice of resinous milkweed in the wine; Of the fruits, I allowed dry figs and almonds with sugar. I ordered him to endure thirst, and if the thirst became excessive, I mixed vinegar with water and gave him something to drink. I also crushed wolf bast leaves, sifted them through a sieve, mixed figs with honey and gave them to the patient before and after meals. In general, I never left it for a single day without emptying." These are the words of Galen.

As for the nutrition of patients with dropsy, it should be meager, once a day. If the patient can abstain from wheat bread, because it sticks together and produces blockages, then let him do so and limit himself to barley bread with seeds, and if it is impossible to do without wheat bread, then it should be oven-baked bread from coarse flour, good baked and dried so that it does not bloom. It needs to be baked from non-sticky wheat, and some people put chickpea flour in it, and it needs to be flavored, for example, with the oil of unripe olives. Such patients should also be fed with vinegar with olive oil, spices and seasonings - it is good for them. Chicken broth is useful for them: its diuretic effect is combined with the ability to correct the nature of the liver, as well as the dish that Christians prepare from olives, carrots and garlic. Their food is a decoction of chickpeas, as well as broth from larks, from an old rooster and from chicken, especially with the herb oilseed milkweed. The meat that they sometimes eat should be light meat of birds, such as turk, mountain partridge, doves, wood pigeons and larks, as well as the meat of khat partridges, the meat of gazelles, kids and the meat of small fish, seasoned with thinning, caustic and tearing substances. Snake pickle is very good for them, but it sometimes excites excessive thirst. Vegetables that are useful for such patients are, for example, celery, beets, eryngium, chicory, fume, a little quinoa, leek, ruga, caraway leaves, mint, garlic, capers, mustard; all grains are harmful to them, especially to patients with hydrocele; As for various seeds, pistachios, nuts and bitter almonds, they are useful for them. Sometimes they are allowed, on days when the strictures of the regime are relaxed, a few dates and raisins, but they are not allowed at all to have fresh fruits, except for sweet pomegranate. As for wine, a person suffering from hot dropsy should not approach it, and those suffering from cold dropsy should drink only liquid, old wine, and not on an empty stomach or immediately after eating, but after some time, when it becomes known that the food has already gone down from the stomach.

As for enemas and suppositories, they use enemas made from juices that remove aqueous humor, adding, for example, sagapen, “orris root” and the like. Candles that remove water well. They take nettle seeds - fifty pieces, milkweed seeds - thirty pieces, agaric seeds - seven qirats, copper scale - two-thirds of darachmi.

All this is mixed with bread crumb, turned into candles and consumed in the amount of six or nine qirats.

Of the diuretics, all diuretics help dropsy. This medicine, which expels urine, is good for them: they take nettle seed - nine qirats, black hellebore - the same amount, bladder cherry - one darakhmi, Indian sumbul - two darakhmi. All this is mixed and taken; at one time they give you a drink of misqal in wine with spices. Another medicine that expels urine: take branches of the balsam tree, sumbul, Ceylon cinnamon, cumin, rhizome of iris, St. John's wort, inflorescences of rush, arum, bush, amoma, simirniyun, and this is a genus of wild parsley, futrasaliyun, that is, the seeds of mountain parsley, sweet reed , pepper, bladder cherry, sisaliyus, that is, stinking ferula of Rum, - each with a gift. All this is mixed and two darachmi are drunk at a time.