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

Translation. For rapidly developing, or acute diseases, also resolve of their own accord, sometimes through favourable chance and sometimes through nature's favour. Consequently, ignorant people, carried away by this, often avoid physicians and attribute these favourable outcomes to new incantations and amulets, or to chance; for these rapidly developing diseases are driven out either by a flow of sweat, by blood discharged through the nose, or by a discharge from the intestines. But chronic diseases, or diseases of slow development, which have already gained possession of the body with a kind of prior claim, call for the skill of the physician alone, since they are resolved neither by nature nor by chance.

Interpretation. Caelius Aurelianus contrasts spontaneous resolution in acute disease with the entrenched course of chronic disease. Here passiones means affections or diseases, not emotions; ligamenta means protective bindings or amulets, not anatomical ligaments; proventus means favourable outcomes. The metaphor praejudicio quodam gives the established disease something like a prior claim on the body. The final assertion is the author's defence of professional medicine, not a present-day law that every chronic disease requires effective medical treatment or that none can remit spontaneously. The account of sweating, nosebleeds and intestine discharge describes his historical explanation, not evidence that deliberately producing these discharges cures acute disease. ^[ref]