She lies without food, her body given over to pain, wasting away in tears all day long, ever since she learned that her husband had wronged her. She will not lift her eyes or raise her face from the ground, and when her friends advise her she listens like a rock or a wave of the sea.

Medea lies without food, her body given over to pain, "wasting all the time away in tears." The verb συντήκω, "to melt away," is the word Hippocrates uses for wasting away from hunger. She will not lift her eyes from the ground, and she hears her friends' advice the way a rock or a sea wave would. Nothing in the description is violent yet. The nurse is describing grief, the kind a doctor would recognize: no food, no interest in the world, the body given up. The danger she fears comes a few lines later.