Essence of Fever

Fever is an extraneous warmth that flares up in the heart and spreads from it throughout the body, through the pneuma and blood, through the arteries and veins. It flares up in the body to such an extent that it disrupts its natural actions, and it is not the same as warmth from anger or fatigue, for the latter does not reach the point of sticking to the body and disrupting its actions.

Some people divide fevers into two primary types - fever as a disease, and fever as a symptom, and classify fever with tumors as a genus of fever-symptoms. The meaning of their statement is that a fever-disease is a fever in which there is no intermediary link between it and its cause, which is not a disease. This is putrefactive fever: putrefaction is the cause of fever without an intermediary link, but putrefaction itself is not a disease, but only the cause of the disease. As for fever with a tumor, it arises from the tumor, exists with the existence of the tumor and accompanies it, and the tumor is a disease in itself. Anyone who disputes this may say: If the fever of a tumor accompanies the heat of the tumor and occurs as a result of pain from the tumor, then it seems that this is a fever-symptom, but then many one-day fevers must be fevers-symptoms. If the fever depends on the putrefaction contained in the tumor, then the tumor is its root cause not because it is a tumor, but due to the putrefaction present in it; Thus, the cause of fever is essentially putrefaction, and swelling is only a secondary cause; or he can say that if by fever-symptom we mean not this, but that it accompanies a tumor and its existence is conditioned by the existence of the tumor, then the same is the case with putrefactive fevers in relation to putrefactiveness. However, engaging in such bickering does not provide anything useful to medical science and forces the doctor to move from his art to research that distracts him from his craft. Let us follow the generally accepted path in this and say: let fevers with tumors and blockages be fevers-symptoms!

We will also say that everything that exists in the human body is divided into three types: these are organs that contain liquids and pneumas - they can be compared to the walls of a bathhouse, - or liquids contained in organs - their similarity is the water in a bathhouse, - or pneuma, mental, animal and natural, as well as vapors dispersed in the body - the air in the bathhouse is similar to them. That which is ignited by primary combustion due to extraneous heat belongs to one of the three substances mentioned. When the primary ignition dies out, what is adjacent to it cools, but when what is adjacent to it cools, the ignition does not necessarily have to die out; on the contrary, it can persist and again heat up what is adjacent to it. Apart from those mentioned, there are no bodily substances in man.

If the fever first sticks to the main organs, such as carbon deposits on the walls of a bathhouse, or on a blacksmith’s fur, or on a cook’s cauldron, then this kind of fever is called fever from tabes; if the fever first sticks to the juices, and then spreads from them through the organs, just as in baths, it happens that hot water is poured and the walls heat up, or hot soup is poured into a cauldron and the cauldron heats up for this reason, then this is a fever of this kind. a kind called juice fever. And when a fever first sticks to the pneuma and vapors and then spreads from them through the organs and juices, just as hot air sometimes enters a bathhouse, or a bathhouse is heated, and the air in it heats up and passes into the water and onto the walls, then it is a fever of this kind, which is called one-day fever, because it adheres to a rarefied substance, which quickly dissipates, and the fever rarely passes the limit of one day and night, unless it turns into a fever of another kind.

This is the division of fevers in a manner close to the division according to species differences in logic, but sometimes fevers are divided, approaching from other sides, and they say that there are acute and non-acute fevers, there are chronic and non-chronic, there are night and daytime, there are safe, safe, but there are also severe ones, with bad symptoms; There are intermittent ones, there are also continuous ones, and among the continuous ones there are fevers with intensification and outbreaks, and there are also attacks of the same strength. There are hot fevers, and there are also cold ones, with chills and goose bumps; there are simple ones, and there are complex ones.