Subsection 6. Parents as a cause through inheritance.

The other inward, inborn cause of melancholy is the constitution, wholly or partly, that we receive from our parents. Fernel calls it “contrary to nature,” or unnatural, since it is a hereditary disease. As he maintains: “As is the seed of the parents, especially the father, so become the uniform tissues and parts formed from the seed; whatever disease the father suffers when he begets a child, he passes on with the seed to his offspring.”

As the father’s constitution is, so is the son’s; whatever disease the father had when he fathered him, the son will have after him, inheriting his infirmities as surely as his lands. Where the father’s temperament and constitution are corrupt, says Roger Bacon, the son’s temperament and constitution must likewise be corrupt, and so the corruption passes from father to son.

Now this appears less in the body’s structure—according to the saying of Hippocrates—in build, proportions, scars and other features, than in the mind’s manners and dispositions:

And with the seed, fathers’ ways pass to their sons.

Seleucus had an anchor-shaped mark on his thigh, and so did his descendants, as Trogus records in book 15. Lepidus, in Pliny, book 7, chapter 17, had poor eyesight, and so did his son. The famous family of the Ahenobarbi were known in antiquity, and took their surname, from their red beards. The Austrian lip and those Indians’ flat noses are inherited, as are the Bavarian chin and prominent eyes among Jews, as Buxtorf observes.

Their voice, gait, gestures and looks are likewise passed down, with all their other qualities and infirmities: like mother, like daughter. Lemnius maintains that their very emotions follow their seed, and that children’s malice and bad dispositions must often be blamed entirely on their parents. I therefore need have no doubt that melancholy is a hereditary disease.

Paracelsus expressly affirms it in On the Diseases of the Mentally Disturbed, volume 4, treatise 1; so does Crato in a letter to Monavius, and Bruno Seidel in his book On Incurable Disease. Montalto, chapter 11, argues from Hippocrates and Plutarch that such hereditary dispositions are common. Speaking of a patient, he says: “I believe this comes about from an inherited melancholic imbalance.” I think he became so by sharing in melancholy.

Daniel Sennert, book 1, part 2, chapter 9, maintains that this melancholic constitution passes not only from father to son but sometimes through the whole family: “Sometimes hereditary in entire families.” Forestus, in his Medical Observations, illustrates the point with a merchant, his patient, who had inherited this infirmity. So does Rodrigo de Fonseca, volume 1, consultation 69, with the case of a young man affected “through a melancholy mother”—he had a melancholy mother—“and a melancholy-producing diet,” a bad diet as well.

Luis Mercado, a Spanish physician, in the excellent treatise he has recently written on hereditary diseases, Works, volume 2, book 5, lists leprosy—as among those Gaibots in Gascony, hereditary lepers—pox, stone, gout, epilepsy, and so forth. Among the rest, melancholy and madness come upon many people after a certain time—something he calls a marvel of nature—and remain with them for ever as an incurable condition.

More astonishing still, in some families it skips the father and passes to the son, or affects every second and sometimes every third generation in the direct line of descent. It does not always produce the same disease, but a similar or corresponding one. These secondary causes, derived in this way, are commonly so powerful that, as Wolphius holds, “they often change the decrees of the stars”: they often alter the primary causes and the decrees of heaven.

Presumably for these reasons, Church and state, human and divine law, have united to prevent hereditary diseases by forbidding marriages between people related in any degree. Mercado advises every family to choose partners, “if possible, whose natures differ most”: to select those whose constitutions differ most from their own, if they love their families and care about the common good.

Indeed, I think God’s special providence has ordained that in every age there should be—as there usually is—once in six hundred years, a migration of nations to improve and purify their blood, just as we change the seed sown on our land. Hence the flood, as it were, of those northern Goths and Vandals, and many similar peoples who came from the lands of Scandinavia and Sarmatia, as some suppose, and swept like a deluge over most of Europe and Africa,

to change for the better our constitutions, badly damaged by the hereditary infirmities we had contracted through lust and intemperance. A healthy race of strong, able men was sent among us, such as those northern men generally are: harmless, free from excess and free from disease, to temper us and make us like those poor naked Indians generally are today;

and like the people around Brazil, as a recent writer observes, on the island of Maranhão: free from all hereditary diseases and other contagion, commonly living for a hundred and twenty years or more without medicine, as in the Orkneys and many other places. Such are the usual effects of temperance and intemperance. But I will turn to particulars and show by what means, and especially through whom, this infirmity is passed down to us.

“Children born to old men seldom have a sound constitution.” Old men’s children seldom have a good temperament, as Scoltzius supposes in consultation 177, and are therefore particularly prone to this disease. As Levinus Lemnius further adds, old men generally father wayward, irritable, sad, melancholy sons, and seldom cheerful ones.

A man who fathers a child on a full stomach will have either a sick child or a mentally impaired son, as Cardan thinks in Medical Contradictions, book 1, contradiction 18. The same applies if the parents are ill or have a severe pain in the head, a migraine or headache; Hieronymus Wolf gives the example of a child of Sebastian Castellio.