Source edition
Galen. Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, Volume 7. Kühn, Karl Gottlob, editor. Leipzig: Knobloch, 1824.
Source data
A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies · CC BY-SA 4.0
Cloned and adapted by Humanitext, with ongoing edits.
Summary
This work is a medical treatise in which Galen systematically classifies and explains the regularity of "types" (typos) and "periods" observed in diseases, particularly febrile illnesses. At the outset, the author explains his purpose and defines disease types by classifying them into primary/secondary, fixed/shifting, and simple/compound. In the middle section, he details the definitions and accompanying symptoms of the major fevers—quotidian, tertian, and quartan—while thoroughly analyzing the clinical characteristics and dangers of the highly critical "hemitertian" fever. In the final section, Galen explains how these basic fevers can double, combine, or intersect to form complex pathological patterns, illustrating their cycles and schedules with concrete clinical cases. By finding consistent patterns within seemingly irregular symptoms, the work provides physicians with practical diagnostic guidelines to predict the course of an illness.