The Subduing and Transmutation of Food

But if the stomach both retains and benefits by its food, then it employs it for the end for which it [the stomach] naturally exists.

It exists to partake of that which is of a quality befitting and proper to it.

Thus it attracts all the most useful parts of the food in a vaporous 327 and finely divided condition, storing this up in its own coats, and applying 328 it to them.

When the stomach is sufficiently full it, puts away from it as something troublesome.

Meanwhile, the food has obtained some profit from its association with the stomach.

If two bodies are adapted for acting and being acted upon, then when they come together then one will act and the other will be acted upon.

• If their forces are equal, then they will act and be acted upon equally
• If the one be much superior in strength, it will exert its activity upon its passive neighbour

Thus, while producing a great and appreciable effect, it will itself be acted upon either little or not at all.

• A deleterious drug masters the forces of the body.
• A nourishing food is mastered by them.329

Thus, food which is suited for the animal is correspondingly subdued by the qualities in the animal.

To be subdued means to undergo alteration.330

Some parts are stronger in power and others weaker.

Therefore, while all will subdue the nutriment which is proper to the animal, they will not all do so equally.

Thus the stomach will subdue and alter its food, but not to the same extent as will the liver, veins, arteries, and heart.

To what extent does the stomach alters food?

The alteration is more than that which occurs in the mouth, but less than that in the liver and veins.

The latter alteration changes the nutriment into the substance of blood. Whereas that in the mouth does not completely transmute it.

The bread stuck in your teeth overnight is not exactly bread, nor the meat.

They have a smell similar to that of the animal’s mouth.

They have been disintegrated and dissolved.

They have had the qualities of the animal’s flesh impressed upon them.

If you chew some corn and then apply it to an unripe [undigested] boil, you will see it rapidly transmuting and entirely digesting the boil.

But it cannot do so if you mix it with water.

This phlegm [saliva] in the mouth is also a cure for lichens 331.

It even rapidly destroys scorpions.

It instantly kills some animals which emit venom, and others after an interval.

To all of them it does great damage.

The masticated food is firstly soaked in and mixed up with this phlegm.

Then it is brought into contact with the actual skin of the mouth.

Thus it undergoes more change than the food which is wedged into the vacant spaces between the teeth.

But just as masticated food is more altered than the latter kind, so is food which has been swallowed more altered than that which has been merely masticated.

There is no comparison between these two processes; we have only to consider what the stomach contains—phlegm, bile, pneuma, [innate] heat,332 and, indeed the whole substance of the stomach.

If one considers along with this the adjacent viscera, like a lot of burning hearths around a great cauldron—to the right the liver, to the left the spleen, the heart above, and along with it the diaphragm (suspended and in a state of constant movement), and the omentum sheltering them all—you may believe what an extraordinary alteration it is which occurs in the food taken into the stomach.

How could it easily become blood if it were not previously prepared by means of a change of this kind? It has already been shown333 that nothing is altered all at once from one quality to its opposite. How then could bread, beef, beans, or any other food turn into blood if they had not previously undergone some other alteration?

And how could the faeces be generated right away in the small intestine?334 For what is there in this organ more potent in producing alteration than the factors in the stomach? Is it the number of the coats, or the way it is surrounded by neighbouring viscera, or the time that the food remains in it, or some kind of innate heat which it contains? Most assuredly the intestines have the advantage of the stomach in none of these respects. For what possible reason, then, will objectors have it that bread may often remain a whole night in the stomach and still preserve its original qualities, whereas when once it is projected into the intestines, it straightway becomes ordure?

For, if such a long period of time is incapable of altering it, neither will the short period be sufficient, or, if the latter is enough, surely the longer time will be much more so! Well, then, can it be that, while the nutriment does undergo an alteration in the stomach, this is a different kind of alteration and one which is not dependent on the nature of the organ which alters it? Or if it be an alteration of this latter kind, yet one perhaps which is not proper to the body of the animal? This is still more impossible. Digestion was shown to be nothing else than an alteration to the quality proper to that which is receiving nourishment.335 Since, then, this is what digestion means and since the nutriment has been shown to take on in the stomach a quality appropriate to the animal which is about to be nourished by it, it has been demonstrated adequately that nutriment does undergo digestion in the stomach.

And Asclepiades is absurd when he states that the quality of the digested food never shows itself either in eructations or in the vomited matter, or on dissection.336 For of course the mere fact that the food smells of the body shows that it has undergone gastric digestion. But this man is so foolish that, when he hears the Ancients saying that the food is converted in the stomach into something “good,” he thinks it proper to look out not for what is good in its possible effects, but for what is good to the taste: this is like saying that apples (for so one has to argue with him) become more apple-like [in flavour] in the stomach, or honey more honey-like!

Erasistratus, however, is still more foolish and absurd.

He either did not perceive in what sense the Ancients said that digestion is similar to the process of boiling, or because he purposely confused himself with sophistries.

He says it is inconceivable that digestion, involving as it does such trifling warmth, should be related to the boiling process.

This is as if we were to suppose that it was necessary to put the fires of Etna under the stomach before it could manage to alter the food; or else that, while it was capable of altering the food, it did not do this by virtue of its innate heat, which of course was moist, so that the word boil was used instead of bake.

He should have shown that the food is not transmuted or altered in quality by the stomach at all, and secondly, if he could not be confident of this, he ought to have tried to show that this alteration was not of any advantage to the animal.337

If, again, he were unable even to make this misrepresentation, he ought to have attempted to confute the postulate concerning the active principles—to show, in fact, that the functions taking place in the various parts do not depend on the way in which the Warm, Cold, Dry, and Moist are mixed, but on some other factor.

He had the audacity to misrepresent facts even so far as this.

Yet he should have tried at least to show that the Warm is not the most active of all the principles which play a part in things governed by Nature.

But if he was unable to demonstrate this any more than any of the previous propositions, then he ought not to have made himself ridiculous by quarrelling uselessly with a mere name—as though Aristotle had not clearly stated in the fourth book of his “Meteorology,” as well as in many other passages, in what way digestion can be said to be allied to boiling, and also that the latter expression is not used in its primitive or strict sense.

The one starting-point of all this is an enquiry into the question of the Warm, Cold, Dry and Moist.

This Aristotle carried out in the second of his books “On Genesis and Destruction”. There, he shows that all the transmutations and alterations throughout the body take place as a result of these principles.

Erasistratus, however, advanced nothing against these or anything else that has been said above, but occupied himself merely with the word “boiling.”