{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.043369474562135114, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.504587155963303, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
External Causes of Illness

If an illness was to be understood, diagnosed, and treated, it was crucial in medical practice to identify its cause within the body, above all the nature and location of the morbid matter in question. However, contemporary medicine also paid great heed to external causes that could trigger or promote a disease. Such causes helped explain what had set a pathological process in motion in the first place. Particularly in the case of chronic illness, the seed of the sickness in a specific body part had already been present early on, indeed perhaps since birth, as people believed. When, however, it was met with, to use Handsch’s words, “disorder [. . .] be it with eating, drinking, anger, insult, chagrin, or other symptoms”, the disease became manifest. In Handsch’s experience, patients and their relatives demanded such an explanation. They wanted the physician to explain to them where the disease had come from and they expressed their own assumptions in ways such as, “He has eaten or drunk it” or he “had a sudden drink when [he was] heated, and so harmed the liver”; it “came to him when he got a fright”, he “crossed an evil trail”, or “it was done to him”.