Subsection 5 Bad air as a cause of melancholy

Air is a very important cause of this or any other disease, since through breathing it is continually drawn into our bodies and their innermost parts. If impure and foggy, it depresses the spirits and causes disease by infecting the heart, as Paulus says, book 1, chapter 49; so do Avicenna, book 1; Galen, On Preserving Health; Mercurialis; Montalto and others.

Fernel says that thick air thickens the blood and humours. Lemnius identifies two principal things capable of doing our bodies the greatest good and the greatest harm: air and diet. Nothing, Joubert holds, more readily causes this particular disease than the air in which we breathe and live. As the air is, so are our spirits; as our spirits are, so are our humours. Air commonly harms us if it is too hot and dry, thick, sooty, cloudy, blustering or stormy.

Bodin, in his Republic, book 5, chapter 1, and in chapter 5 of his Method of History, demonstrates that hot countries suffer most from melancholy. Consequently, Spain, Africa and Asia Minor have great numbers of mad people, so many that every important city is obliged to build special hospitals for them. Leo Africanus, book 3 on the city of Fez, Ortelius and Zwinger confirm as much. They are generally so irritable in their speech that scarcely two words of ordinary conversation pass without abuse or scolding, and they frequently quarrel in the streets.

Bernard of Gordon wants everyone to take notice: “Observe,” he says, “that it is much more common in hot countries than in cold.” Yet what we have just said is not always so, for, as Acosta truly says, even beneath the equator itself there are places with a most temperate climate and wholesome air, a paradise of delight: leaves always green, cooling showers.

But it does hold for places of excessive heat, as Johannes a Meggen found in Cyprus, and others in Malta, Apulia and the Holy Land. At certain seasons there is nothing but dust: the rivers dried up, the air scorching, the earth ablaze. Many pilgrims walking barefoot out of devotion over the hot sands from Joppa to Jerusalem often go mad, or are completely overwhelmed by sand, “in deep sands,” as happens in many parts of Africa, Arabia Deserta and Bactriana, now Charassan: when the west wind blows, “travellers are engulfed in sand and killed.”

Hercules de Saxonia, a professor in Venice, gives this reason for so many Venetian women being melancholy: “because they spend a long time in the sun”—they remain in the sun too long. Montanus, consultation 21, gives this among the reasons why his Jewish patient was mad: “because he exposed himself so much to heat and cold”—he exposed himself so much to heat and cold.

For that reason there is little movement in Venice’s brick-paved streets around noon in summer: most people are then asleep, as they are in the Great Mughal’s territories and throughout the East Indies. At Aden in Arabia, as Ludovico di Varthema relates in his travels, markets are held at night to avoid the extreme heat. In Hormuz, people of every sort lie in water up to their chins all day, like cattle in a pasture.

At Braga in Portugal, Burgos in Castile and Messina in Sicily, and throughout Spain and Italy, streets are mostly narrow to keep out the sun’s rays. The Turks wear large turbans “to ward off the sun’s rays”—to deflect the sunlight. The hot air of Bantam in Java causes our men staying there to trade great discomfort. It is so hot that people suffering from the pox commonly lie bleaching in the sun to dry their sores.

I read a similar complaint about the Cape Verde islands, fourteen degrees from the equator: “they have a bad reputation.” One writer calls them the world’s unhealthiest climate because of the diarrhoea, fevers, frenzies and burning fevers that commonly attack sailors who call there, all attributed to the air’s excessive heat. This heat harms even the hardiest men, and the toughest labourers cannot withstand it, as Constantine affirms, Agriculture, book 2, chapter 45.

Even those born in such a climate may be unable to bear it, as Niger records of a part of Mesopotamia now called Diarbecha: “In some places it is so exposed to raging heat that most living creatures are killed by the burning sun and sky.” It is so hot in some places that local people and cattle die of it. Adricomius says of Arabia Felix that, because of the myrrh, frankincense and hot spices growing there, the air is so harmful to the brain that at times even the inhabitants cannot endure it, much less the weak and strangers.

Amatus Lusitanus, first hundred case histories, case 45, tells of a girl of about thirteen, the daughter of a leather dresser named Vincent, who would wash her hair in the heat of the day in July, then let it dry in the sun to turn it golden. But by staying in the heat too long she inflamed her head and drove herself mad.

At the other extreme, cold air is almost as bad as hot, and Montaltus judges it so in chapter 11, if it is dry as well. In those northern countries the people are therefore generally dull and sluggish, and many are witches—a condition that Saxo Grammaticus, Olaus and Giambattista della Porta attribute to melancholy, as I have already quoted. But these cold climates are more subject to natural melancholy, which is cold and dry, than to this artificial kind. That is presumably why Mercurius Britannicus places melancholy people immediately beneath the Pole.

The worst of the three is thick, cloudy, misty, foggy air, or air that comes from fens, marshy ground, lakes, dunghills, privies and drains, wherever carcasses or carrion lie, or from any source of a foul, disgusting smell. Galen, Avicenna and Mercurialis, physicians ancient and modern, hold that such air is unhealthy and breeds melancholy, plagues and what not?

Alexandretta, a port on the Mediterranean, and San Juan de Ulúa, a harbour in New Spain, are much condemned for their bad air, as are Durrës in Albania, Lithuania, Dithmarschen, the Pontine Marshes in Italy, the areas around Pisa and Ferrara, and so on; and here, Romney Marsh, the Essex Hundreds and the Lincolnshire Fens.