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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Subsection 3 Terrors and Frights as Causes of Melancholy

SUBSECTION 3 Terrors and frights as causes of melancholy

Cicero, in book 4 of his Tusculan Disputations, distinguishes these terrors, arising from the perception of some dreadful thing heard or seen, from other fears. So does Patrizi in book 5, title 4 of On the Education of a King.

Of all fears, these are the most harmful and violent. They change the body’s entire constitution so suddenly, stir the soul and spirits, and leave so deep an impression that those affected can never recover. They cause graver and more violent melancholy than any internal cause whatever, as Felix Plater says from experience in chapter 3 of On Mental Alienation: it imprints itself so forcibly on the spirits, brain and humours that, even if all the blood were drained from the body, it could hardly be removed. This horrible kind of melancholy, as he calls it, had often been brought before him, and commonly troubles and terrifies men and women, young and old, of every sort.

Hercules de Saxonia gives this kind of melancholy a special name: “from the agitation of the spirits.” It comes from the agitation, movement, contraction and expansion of the spirits, rather than any disorder of the humours, and has powerful effects. According to Plutarch, this terror most often arises from some imminent danger, when something dreadful is close at hand, heard, seen or imagined, whether it truly appears or comes in a dream. Often, the more sudden the event, the more violent the terror.

Terror holds the mind; the stunned heart leaps, And the frightened liver throbs with trembling veins.

Their soul is frightened; their astonished heart shakes; The trembling liver throbs within the veins and aches.

Arthemedorus the grammarian lost his reason at the unexpected sight of a crocodile, according to Du Laurens, chapter 7 of On Melancholy. The massacre at Lyon in 1572, during the reign of Charles IX, was so terrible and frightening that many went mad, some died, and heavily pregnant women gave birth before their time; everyone was generally terrified and aghast.

Many lose their reason at the sudden sight of some ghost or devil, something very common in every age, says Lavater in part 1, chapter 9. Orestes did so at the sight of the Furies, who appeared to him in black, as Pausanias records. The Greeks call such things “bogeys”: they terrify people’s souls. Even if people are merely frightened by imitation devils as a joke—

As children tremble and fear everything In blind darkness—

as children in the dark imagine hobgoblins and are terribly afraid—they remain the worse for it all their lives. Some are affected by sudden fires, earthquakes, floods or other dreadful sights. Themison the physician fell into hydrophobia through seeing someone ill with that disease (Dioscorides, book 6, chapter 33). Or the sight of a monster or a corpse disturbs them for many months afterwards: they cannot bear the room where a corpse has lain, would not be alone with a dead man for anything in the world, or sleep, even many years later, in a bed in which someone has died.

At Basel, a number of little children went in spring to gather flowers in a meadow at the edge of town, where an executed criminal hung on a gibbet. As they all stared at it, one happened to throw a stone and made it move. Frightened by this, the children ran away. One girl, slower than the others, looked back, saw the disturbed corpse swing towards her, and cried out that it was coming after her. She was so terribly frightened that for many days she could neither rest, eat nor sleep; she could not be comforted, and died in melancholy.

In the same town, across the Rhine, another child saw a grave opened. The sight of the corpse so disturbed her mind that she could not be comforted; she died shortly afterwards and was buried beside it. Plater, Observations, book 1.

A gentlewoman of the same city saw a fat pig cut open. When its entrails were exposed and an offensive smell reached her nose, she was disgusted and would stay no longer. A physician who was present told her that, like the pig, she too was full of filthy excrement, and made matters worse with other loathsome examples. This delicate gentlewoman took it so deeply to heart that she immediately began to vomit. Her mind and body were so badly disturbed that, for months afterwards, all his skill and persuasion could not restore her to herself. She could not forget it or get the sight out of her mind. The same author.

Many cannot bear to see a wound opened without distress, or to see a man executed, suffering from some dreadful disease, possessed, struck by apoplexy or bewitched. If they happen to read of something terrible, even just the symptoms of such a disease, or anything they find repellent, their minds are instantly troubled. They are aghast, ready to apply it to themselves, and as disturbed as if they had seen it or were themselves afflicted. “They seem to themselves to dream of Hecates”: they dream about it and think of it continually.

Equally lamentable effects come from dreadful things heard, read or seen. “Hearing produces the greatest movements in the body,” as Plutarch holds: no sense causes greater changes in body and mind. Sudden words or unexpected news, whether good or bad—“speech less foreseen”—can move us just as much, “overwhelm the mind and cast it out of its place,” as a philosopher observes. They deprive us of sleep and appetite, disturb us and quite overthrow us.

Let those bear witness who have heard the tragic alarms, outcries and hideous noises that so often break out suddenly in the dead of night, when enemies burst in, fires accidentally start, and so on. Such panics often drive people out of their minds, depriving them of their senses, understanding and everything: some for a time, others for the rest of their lives, never to recover.

3701.Tully is Marcus Tullius Cicero. Tusculan Disputations 4.8.19 distinguishes several forms of fear and defines terror as fear that shakes a person, producing pallor, trembling and chattering teeth. Burton develops this distinction through his medical examples. The Patrizi reference remains for exact collation.

3703.Temperature means bodily constitution or the balance of qualities, not a thermometer reading. Spirits and humours belong to Burton’s inherited physiology. Plater’s claim about draining all the blood is an image of the impression’s persistence, not an instruction to bleed a patient. Burton attributes the observations and prognosis to Plater.

3708.Hercules de Saxonia is the physician Ercole Sassonia. His proposed distinction separates disturbed spirits from disordered humours. Burton then joins physical, imagined and dreamed threats in one account of fright. The marginal dream concerns a painter’s wife in Basel and adds an example absent from the body.

3710.Hercules Oetaeus 708–709, transmitted among Seneca’s tragedies: Deianira describes fear still lodged in her body. The fresh translation of the Latin is followed by Burton’s own English couplet, modernized separately. The liver belongs to the passage’s bodily imagery and has not been replaced by a modern organ or diagnosis.

3712.Great-bellied means heavily pregnant; brought to bed means delivered of a child. Lions is Lyon. Burton’s marginal source is a historical account of religion in France; the precise narrative and the grammarian’s name remain for collation. These reported effects are preserved as his evidence, not independently confirmed clinical findings.

3715.Spectrum means an apparition or ghost. Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.34.3, says that the Furies appeared black when they were about to drive Orestes mad, then white when he recovered after biting off a finger. Burton gives only the terrifying appearance. The Greek is printed μορμολύχεια, rendered bogeys; the more usual form is μορμολύκεια. The printed form is retained.

3717.Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 2.55–56; the comparison recurs elsewhere in the poem. Burton quotes the frightened children, then supplies his own English explanation. Both are retained rather than silently collapsing quotation and gloss.

3718.Hydrophobia literally means fear of water; in historical medical writing it is associated with the disease called rabies. Burton’s anecdote makes sight the immediate trigger. It should not be read as establishing transmission by looking. Physick elsewhere in this subsection means medicine, and coarse here is corpse. The Dioscorides citation remains uncollated.

3720.Basil is Basel. The exposed body of an executed criminal supplies the terrifying object in Plater’s reported case. Burton distinguishes the stone’s actual movement of the corpse from the child’s interpretation that it pursued her.

3722.Nice here means delicate or fastidious; savour means smell. The source prints boby for body. The physician’s words intensify the woman’s disgust, and his subsequent inability to calm her makes speech itself part of the causal sequence.

3724.Apoplexy was a broad historical category involving sudden loss of bodily or mental function, not necessarily one modern diagnosis. Compare Lucian, Philopseudes 39: after hearing frightening stories, Tychiades seems to see monsters, spirits and Hecates. Hecate’s plural name denotes apparitions. Burton’s Latin changes seeing to dreaming and generalizes the experience. This is a close Greek parallel; his Latin intermediary remains unverified.

3727.De auditione is Plutarch’s On Listening. The marginal Theodore Prodromus reference points to a literary work of love, despite the body’s general description “a philosopher.” Prævisa minus oratio means speech insufficiently foreseen or unexpected. The two Latin phrases and Burton’s English expansions are all retained.

3729.Panic recalls Pan or Faunus and his association with sudden collective terror; the marginal Alciato verse makes that connection explicit. Its printed emblem number is 122. The exact edition and wording remain to be collated.