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The critical days which answer to the periods of the process of coction are to be watched with anxiety, and the correspondence of the state of the patient with the expected condition which he ought to show at those epochs ascertained.
Referring diseases in general to the condition or distribution of the humours, for he regards inflammation as the passing of blood into parts not previously containing it, he considers that so long as those liquids occupy the system in an unnatural or adulterated state, disease continues; but as they ferment or undergo coction, various characteristic symptoms appear, and, when their elaboration is completed, they are discharged by perspiration or other secretions, by alvine dejections, etc.
The stomach is made in the figure of a bagpipe. There the aliments being dissolved by a quick coction, or digestion, are all confounded, and make up a soft liquor, which afterwards becomes a kind of milk, called chyle; and which being at last brought into the heart, receives there, through the plenty of spirits, the form, vivacity, and colour of blood.
If this substance be dissolved by a process of coction, and the employment of certain chemical reagents, the fibres can then be easily separated, washed, and cleansed from all foreign matter. According to the mode of treatment, the woolly substance is fine or coarse, and is employed as wadding in the one case, and in the other as stuffing for mattresses.
Simon Paulli relates, that he has cured many malignant fevers by the use of a de-coction of them; which he says powerfully promoted sweat and urine without greatly irritating nature, and also raised the spirits and quenched thirst. The flowers are chiefly valued for their pleasant flavour, which is entirely lost even by light coction.
But he recognized, at least in acute diseases, a natural process which the humours went through being first of all crude, then passing through coction or digestion, and finally being expelled by resolution or crisis through one of the natural channels of the body.
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