Note 328 — THIRD SECTION. Relation of the Physician to Diseases consequent upon the Use or Misuse of the Genital Organs.

Aretaeus, De sign, chron. morb. bk. IV. ch. 11., ἄλλος ῥόος λευκὸς ἡ ἐπιμήνιος κάθαρσις λευκὴ δριμεῖα καὶ ὀδαξώδης ἐς ἡδονήν. ἐπὶ δὲ τοῖσι καὶ ὑγροῦ λευκοῦ, πάχεος, γονοειδέος πρόκλησις· τόδε τὸ εἶδος γονόρῤῥοιαν γυναικείαν ἐλέξαμεν· ἔστι δὲ τῆς ὑστέρης φύξις, οὕνεκεν ἀκρατὴς τῶν ὑγρῶν γίγνεται· ἀτὰρ καὶ τὸ αἷμα ἐς χροιὴν λευκὴν ἀμείβει. (Another white discharge is the menstrual purging, white, acrid, and provoking a pleasurable itching. But in addition to these forms there is also a calling out of a moist, white, thick, semen-like discharge; and this species we have named “female gonorrhœa”; and it is an escape from the womb, because this cannot retain the moist humours. Further, it actually changes the blood to a white colour.) Perhaps too what Galen, De semine bk. II. ch. 1. (IV. p. 599.), says is pertinent in this connection: ταῖς δ’ ἄλλαις ἔλαττόν τε καὶ ὑγρὸν ἐκπίπτον φαίνεται πολλάκις ἔσωθεν ἐξ αὐτῶν τῶν ὑστερῶν, ἵναπερ οὐρεῖ. (but in other women there appears to be a smaller and moist discharge very often, inside, coming from the womb itself, in micturition). Again Theod. Priscianus, bk. III. 10., says: Aliquando etiam spermatis spontanei et importuni fluxu feminae fatigantur, quod Graeci gonorrhœam appellant. (Sometimes too women are troubled with a discharge of involuntarily and unexpectedly emitted semen, a complaint the Greeks call gonorrhœa.) Comp. the passage quoted above from Aëtius.