Death however is not the certain consequence, if a fever comes on, which may remove the distemper. A dropsical disorder occasioned by an acute distemper, is seldom cured: especially if followed by the opposite symptoms to those above-mentioned. A cough likewise is equally destructive of hope in this distemper: also an hæmorrhage either upward or downward, and a collection of water in the middle of the body(15). Some people too in this disease have swellings, which afterwards subside, and then appear again. Such indeed are more safe than those mentioned before, if they take the proper care: but they commonly perish from a persuasion of their being well. Some people with good reason will wonder, how any thing can at once both be hurtful to our bodies, and in part conduce to their preservation. For whether a dropsy has filled one with water, or a great quantity of pus has been collected in a large abscess, for the whole to be discharged at once is equally mortal, as for a sound person to lose all his blood by a wound. If the joints of any person are pained, so that some tubercles from a callus grow upon them, they are never cured: and the disorders of those parts, which have either begun in old age, or have continued from youth to that time of life, though they may be sometimes mitigated, yet are never entirely removed. An epilepsy also, that begins after the twenty-fifth year, is difficult to cure: and much more so that, which has begun after the fortieth; so that, although there may be some hope from nature, scarce any thing is to be expected from medicine at that age. In the same disease if the whole body is affected at once, and the patient is not sensible of the fit beginning in any part, but falls down suddenly, whatever his age be, he rarely gets free of the distemper: but if his intellects be injured, or a palsy has come on, there is no room for medicine. In purgings too, if attended with a fever; if with an inflammation of the liver, or præcordia, or belly; if with an intolerable thirst; if the disease has continued long; if the discharge of the belly is variegated; if it is expelled with pain, there is danger even of death: and more especially if with these _symptoms_ a dysentery has grown inveterate. And this distemper sweeps off children chiefly to their tenth year: at other times of life, it is more easily endured. A pregnant woman also may be carried off by such a case: and although she herself recovers, yet she loses her child. Moreover a dysentery occasioned by atrabilis is mortal: or a sudden and black discharge from the belly, when the body is already wasted by that distemper. But a lientery is more dangerous, if the purging be frequent; if the belly is discharged at all hours, both with a rumbling, and without it; if it continues with equal violence both night and day; if what is excreted, is either crude, or black, and besides smooth and fetid; if thirst is troublesome; if urine is not made after drinking (the cause of which