This page needs to be proofread.
290
THE SUSHRUTA SAMHITA.
[ Chap. XXXI.

looked upon as rapidly succumbing. A wise physician should abandon a patient, characterised by the coldness of his breath and extremities and a hurried and intermittent respiration, or who is found breathing with his mouth open, or lips separated.

Similarly, a patient affected with a kind of stupor or insomnia and remaining drowsy, all day long, or fainting at the least attempt of speaking, should be counted with the dead. The patient, who licks his upper lip, or is troubled with eructations, or holds conversations with the departed, should be deemed as already entered into the region of the dead. A man, spontaneously bleeding through the roots of his hairs (pores of the skin) otherwise than in a case of poisoning, should be deemed as dying on that day.

A patient, affected with an up-coursing pain about the cardiac region, like the one which distinguishes a case of Vatashtila (appearance of a stone-like lump rising or seated within the thorax and ascribed to the action of the deranged Vayu), accompanied by an aversion to food, etc., should be already reckoned among the dead.

An idiopathic swelling (Shopha) first occurring in either of the lower extremities in a male patient not as a complication of any other disease*[1], as well as a similar swelling first appearing at the face, or about the region

  1. *Such as Chlorosis, Ascites, Hoemorrhoids.