Past exam of the medicine course of the University of Oxford / 1867 / Second examination / Classical paper / Greek translation

Translate :—

ex Aretaei de causis et signis morborum diuturnorum Libri Sec. cap. 7ᵐᵒ.

Translation. The stomach, the internal organ responsible for digestion, performs digestion poorly whenever diarrhoea takes hold of a person; and the diarrhoea consists of liquid, undigested food. Unless this happens from a temporary cause for only one or two days, the whole person becomes weak through wasting of the body, and the coeliac affection of Aretaeus becomes a chronic disease, through weakness of the digestive heat and chilling of the stomach. Then the food is indeed broken down under the action of heat, but the heat does not digest it completely or turn it into an appropriate nutritive fluid: it leaves it half-finished (the printed word is incomplete), through failure of the completing power. The food, abandoned by the process, changes for the worse in colour, smell and consistency. Its colour is white and lacking bile; its smell is foul and dung-like; and it is liquid and without cohesion because the process has failed, retaining only the beginning of digestion as its one good quality. Hence there is gaseous, continual, foul-smelling belching in the stomach.

Text and medical meaning. The scan ends PDF volume p. 101 with λείπε- and begins p. 102 with ἀδρανείῃ. The translation marks this defective word rather than silently pretending that the missing ending is visible. The corresponding edited Greek has λείπει, “leaves”, which supplies the sense used here. The Oxford extract also separates the conditional clause from the following sentence more abruptly than that edition; the translation carries its evident qualification forward. ^[ref]

Aretaeus of Cappadocia uses κοιλίη for the stomach or digestive belly and σκῆνος, literally a tent or dwelling, for the body. ἀτροφίη indicates wasting or failure of nourishment; it need not denote the modern histological concept of atrophy. “Appropriate nutritive fluid” renders χυμὸν οἰκεῖον: the product that the author thinks suitable for bodily nourishment, rather than a modern chemical identification. The pale, foul, loose output is an observed feature; the explanation by weak digestive heat is the author's theory. It is not a modern account of digestion. ^[ref]

The historical coeliac affection of Aretaeus cannot establish a modern diagnosis of coeliac disease. Modern coeliac disease involves an immune response to gluten that damages the small intestine; the ancient symptom description alone cannot identify that mechanism. The diagnosis should therefore not be read back into the passage as certain. ^[ref]