O blessed health! You are above all gold and treasure, Ecclesiasticus 30:15: the poor man’s riches, the rich man’s bliss; without you there can be no happiness. Or we may be afflicted with some loathsome disease, offensive to others or troublesome to ourselves: bad breath, misshapen limbs, bodily crookedness, the loss of an eye, leg or hand, pallor, thinness, redness, baldness, the loss or lack of hair, and so on.

“When it begins to fall out, it deals dreadful blows to the heart,” says Synesius, himself not a little troubled “by the loss of his hair.” Hair loss alone strikes a cruel blow to the heart. Acco, an old woman, happened to see her face in a truthful mirror—for, apparently, she used false, flattering mirrors at other times, as most gentlewomen do—and “through anguish of mind fell into madness” (Caelius Rhodiginus, book 17, chapter 2): she went mad.

Brotheus, the son of Vulcan, threw himself into the fire because his imperfections made him an object of ridicule. Lais of Corinth, now grown old, gave her mirror to Venus because she could not bear to look into it: “As I am, I will not see myself; as I was, I cannot.” Generally, to these beautiful, fastidious creatures, old age and dirty linen are the two most hateful things, a torment of torments; they cannot endure even the thought of them.

O god, whoever you are Who hear these words, would that I might wander Naked among lions! Before hideous wasting possesses My lovely cheeks, and the life’s sap drains From this tender prey, I seek, still beautiful, To feed the tigers.

To be foul, ugly and deformed—far better to be buried alive. Some are beautiful but barren, and that torments them. Hannah wept bitterly, did not eat, and was troubled in spirit, all because she was barren, 1 Samuel 1. And in Genesis 30, Rachel said in the anguish of her soul, “Give me a child, or I shall die.” Another has too many. One has never married, and that is his hell; another is married, and that is his plague.

Some are troubled because they are obscure; others because they are maligned, slandered, abused, disgraced, vilified or injured in any way: “I am not at all surprised at those,” as he said, “who begin to go mad through being wronged.” I do not wonder at all if injuries make men mad. Aristotle lists seventeen particular causes of anger and offence, which for brevity’s sake I must omit.

No news troubles one person; ill reports, rumours, bad news, hard fortune, failure, losing a lawsuit, vain hopes or hope deferred trouble another. Then there is waiting: “So burdensome is waiting, always and in every matter,” as Polybius observes. One is far too prominent, another too low-born, and that alone tortures him as much as the rest. One has no activity, company or employment; another is overwhelmed and tormented by worldly cares and burdensome business. But what tongue could suffice to tell them all?

Many people acquire this malady by unknowingly eating certain foods, herbs or roots, such as henbane, nightshade, hemlock, mandrakes and so on. A group of young men in Agrigentum in Sicily entered a tavern, where they drank freely. Whether it was the wine itself or something mixed with it is still unknown.

But suddenly their brains became so disturbed, their imagination so deranged, that they thought they were in a ship at sea, about to be wrecked in a storm. To avoid shipwreck and immediate drowning, they therefore threw all the goods in the house out of the windows into the street—or into the sea, as they supposed.

They remained mad in this way for quite some time. When brought before the magistrate to account for their actions, they told him, still not recovered from their madness, that they had done it out of fear of death and to avoid imminent danger.

The onlookers were all astonished at their stupefaction and kept staring at them, while one of the oldest of the company knelt before the magistrate and solemnly excused himself: “O Tritons, I lay in the lowest part.” I beseech your divine majesties, and so on, for I was in the bottom of the ship all the time.

Another begged them, as so many sea gods, to be kind to them, and promised that if he and his companions ever reached land again, he would build an altar for their worship. The magistrate could not laugh enough at their madness; he told them to sleep it off and went on his way. Many such incidents often happen from these unknown causes.

Some cases are caused by love potions, wandering in the sun, the bite of a mad dog, a blow on the head, or the sting of the spider called the tarantula—a common thing in Calabria and Apulia in Italy, if we may believe Schenck, book 6, On Poisons; Cardano, On Subtlety, book 9; and Scaliger, exercise 185. Giovanni Pontano amusingly describes their symptoms in his dialogue Antonius: how they all dance together and are cured by music.

Cardano speaks of certain stones which, if carried on one’s person, cause melancholy and madness. He calls them unlucky, such as adamant, selenites and so on, which dry out the body, increase cares and lessen sleep. In his Persian History, Ctesias mentions a well in those regions: anyone who drinks from it is mad for twenty-four hours.

Some lose their wits at terrifying sights, as I have discussed more fully elsewhere, and often life itself: Hippolytus, frightened by Neptune’s sea-horses; Athamas, by Juno’s Furies. But these stories are common in all writers.

Here I could add other causes, and many more; But the beasts call, the sun declines: I must go.

Many such causes—much more could I say, But my cattle wait for their fodder; The sun declines, and I must be away.

Considered separately and occurring alone, these causes, I readily grant, can do little by themselves when rare or isolated—an old oak is not felled with a single blow—although often each one is fully sufficient.

Yet when they combine, as they often do, “United force is stronger,” and “Things harmless singly do harm in numbers.” They may batter a strong constitution. As Augustine said, many tiny grains of sand sink a ship; many small drops make a flood, and so on. Repeated often, many passing dispositions produce an established habit.