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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Subsection 6. Parents as a Cause Through Inheritance.

Or if a drunken man fathers a child, the child is unlikely ever to have a sound brain, as Gellius argues in book 12, chapter 1. “Drunkards beget drunkards”: one drunkard fathers another, says Plutarch, Table Talk, book 1, question 5. Lemnius endorses this judgement in book 1, chapter 4; so do Alsarius Crutius, Gen. de qui sit med., century 3, folio 182; Macrobius, book 1; Avicenna, book 3, fen 21, tract 1, chapter 8; and Aristotle himself, section 2, problem 4.

Foolish, drunken or flighty women generally bear children like themselves, “ill-tempered and feeble”; and the same applies to a man who sleeps with a menstruating woman.

Sexual intemperance is a principal cause—harmful and destructive—which Lemnius attacks especially in sailors who have intercourse with their wives without taking account of the menstrual flow or observing the time of the new moon. The Portuguese Roderigo de Castro therefore calls such intercourse deadly and pestilential; all physicians, without exception, condemn it.

Moreover, those conceived on the fourth day of the moon are generally unfortunate and mad, delirious, stupid, sickly, unclean, weak, tainted with a foul disease, scarcely capable of surviving, and deprived of every good quality of body and mind. If they live to grow older, says Eustathius, they are born to toil, like Hercules and others.

The Jews particularly attack this foul and unclean intercourse among Christians: they abhor it as unlawful and forbid it among themselves. They blame this unclean intercourse for Christians’ frequent leprosy and madness, their many sick people, skin eruptions, white patches, scabs, discolorations of skin and face, and so many widespread, painful and poisonous diseases. They call those men cruel to their offspring who do not recoil from such intercourse on the fourth day of the moon, while this menstrual filth is flowing.

The divine Law formerly condemned such men and punished them with death—Leviticus 18 and 20. If any children born from such intercourse were deformed or maimed, the father was stoned because he had not kept away from an unclean woman.

When Augustine asked Gregory the Great whether he should tolerate such intercourse among the Britons, Gregory strictly forbade women to have intercourse with their husbands during their customary monthly periods, and so on. I refrain from putting what I have said into English.

Some give another cause: an unregulated diet. If a man eats garlic or onions, fasts too much, studies too hard, is excessively sorrowful, dull, heavy, depressed in spirit, troubled in his thoughts, fearful, and so on, his children, says Cardan in On Subtlety, book 18, will be very prone to madness and melancholy.

For if the spirits of the brain are tainted or disordered by such means at the time of conception, their children’s brains will be tainted too: they will be dull, heavy, timid and discontented all their lives.

Some hold and defend the paradox, or proposition, that wise men generally father fools. Suidas gives the example of Aristarchus the grammarian: “He left two sons, Aristarchus and Aristachorus, both fools.” And, as Erasmus argues in his Praise of Folly, fools father wise men.

Cardan, On Subtlety, book 12, gives this explanation: “Because the spirits of wise men are dissipated by study and carried from the heart into the brain.” Their natural spirits are broken down by study and changed into animal spirits, drawn from the heart and the other parts into the brain.

Lemnius agrees with Cardan and gives this reason: “Because they discharge the debt listlessly and inattentively, so that their offspring fall away from their parents’ excellence.” They pay their debt to their wives, as Paul calls it, without vigour; consequently their children are weaklings, and often idiots and fools.

Other causes are given that belong specifically to the mother and originate in her. If she is excessively dull, heavy, angry, irritable, discontented and melancholy, not only at conception but throughout the time she carries the child in her womb, says Fernel, Pathology, book 1, chapter 11, her son will suffer the same affections, and worse, as Lemnius adds in book 4, chapter 7.

If she grieves too much, is troubled, or happens to be frightened and terrified by some fearful thing she hears or sees, she endangers her child and spoils its humoral balance. A woman’s extraordinary imagination acts powerfully upon her infant, so that, as Baptista Porta demonstrates in Celestial Physiognomy, book 5, chapter 2, she leaves a mark upon it. This is particularly apparent in women who have extraordinary cravings for particular foods: the child will love those foods, says Fernel, and be inclined to similar tastes.

If a pregnant woman sees a hare, her child will often have what we call a harelip. Garcæus, On Judgements of Nativities, chapter 33, gives a memorable example: Thomas Nickell, born in the city of Brandenburg in 1551, reeled and staggered all his life as though about to fall to the ground, because his mother, while pregnant, saw a drunken man staggering in the street.

I find another such case in Martin Weinrich’s Commentary on the Origin of Monstrosities, chapter 17. “I saw,” he says, “a citizen at Wittenberg in Germany who looked like a corpse. I asked him why. He replied that his mother, while carrying him in her womb, happened to see a corpse and was so badly frightened that ‘as a result the child was made like it.’” That ghastly impression made the child resemble the corpse.

In so many different ways are we afflicted and punished for our fathers’ failings, so that, as Fernel truly says, the greatest part of our happiness is to be well born; and it would be fortunate for humankind if only parents sound in body and mind were allowed to marry.

A farmer will sow only the best and choicest seed on his land. He will not rear a bull or a horse unless every part is properly formed, or let a horse cover a mare unless he is sure of its breeding. We choose the best rams for our sheep, rear the finest cattle and keep the best dogs. “How much more carefully should this be observed in producing children?” How careful, then, should we be in fathering our children?

2302.The body cites Table Talk 1.5, but the margin points to The Education of Children, now generally treated as pseudo-Plutarch. Its section 3 advises sobriety at conception and gives Diogenes’ remark about a youth’s drunken father. Gellius, Attic Nights 12.1, discusses breastfeeding and a nurse’s character, including drunkenness; that chapter does not directly establish the same claim about paternal drunkenness. Burton’s references are retained.

2305.Burton switches into Latin for the discussion of intercourse during menstruation. The modern column translates it in full, including his later refusal to translate it. The wording combines menstrual and lunar timing. Its claims of uncleanness, disease and damaged offspring express the cited historical theories, not an established causal account.

2306.Quartâ lunâ means the fourth day of the moon. The adage Quarta luna nati in Manuzio’s expurgated Adagia (1603), p. 63, associates an unlucky birth date with Hercules’ laborious life and cites Eustathius on Iliad 2. It concerns birth, not conception. This narrows the source trail without locating Eustathius directly. The rendering of si seniores as surviving to an older age remains provisional.

2308.Burton reports a polemical account of Jewish objections through the Christian writers cited in his margins. It should not be treated as an unmediated statement of Jewish practice. The disease names are broad historical categories: alphi denotes white skin patches and psoræ scabby eruptions; modern diagnoses would be misleading.

2310.The printed Lev. 18. 20. is read as chapters 18 and 20. Leviticus 18:19 prohibits intercourse during menstrual uncleanness; 20:18 says both parties are to be cut off from their people. Neither verse specifies stoning a father because a child is born with a deformity. Burton adds the Drusius reference at that claim, which requires separate collation.

2312.Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.27, preserves Gregory’s answers to Augustine of Canterbury. The consulted edition places the menstruation discussion under Augustine’s eighth question, not Burton’s response 10. Gregory prohibits intercourse during menstruation but permits church attendance and communion. Burton quotes the prohibition without these latter qualifications; the cause of the numbering difference remains unverified.

2314.Fusted means musty or tainted, applied figuratively to the brain and its spirits; compare Webster’s historical entry. The spirits are the subtle bodily substances of older physiology.

2316.Suidas names the Byzantine lexicon now generally called the Suda. In Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, the personified Folly mocks learned fathers who produce foolish children, citing Cicero and Socrates. This supports that half of Burton’s claim, not by itself the converse that fools beget wise children. Burton turns satire into physiological evidence; the marginal S.b.l. remains unresolved.

2317.Natural and animal spirits are distinct categories in Galenic physiology. Animal here concerns the functions of sensation and movement, not nonhuman animals. Burton compresses their proposed conversion and diversion during study.

2318.The marital debt alludes to 1 Corinthians 7:3, which states a reciprocal duty between spouses. The claim about weak offspring is the medical author’s addition. A raised r appears before Lemnius on page 64, but no corresponding r marginal item is visible on that page; no missing note has been invented.

2321.This is the historical theory of maternal impressions: a pregnant woman’s sights, fears or cravings were thought to imprint corresponding features on her unborn child. The following anecdotes illustrate that theory, rather than establish their alleged causes. Harelip is Burton’s term for a cleft upper lip.

2326.Well born here principally means born to parents considered physically and mentally sound. Burton moves from medical inheritance to restricting marriage and reproduction. The original’s repeated It is retained in the transcription and removed in the modern column.