If meanwhile any physician objects, “Let the cobbler stick to his shoes,” and resents my intrusion into his profession, I will answer briefly: I treat them no differently from the way they treat us. When it benefits them, many of their fraternity, as I know, take holy orders in the hope of obtaining a church living. It is a common change of profession. So why may a melancholy clergyman, who can obtain nothing except by buying a church appointment, not practise medicine?

The Italian Drusianus—whom Trithemius mistakenly calls Crusianus—abandoned his profession because his medical practice was unsuccessful, and afterwards wrote on theology. Marsilio Ficino was “at one and the same time” a priest and a physician, and Thomas Linacre took holy orders in old age. The Jesuits practise both professions today; several of them, “with their superiors’ permission,” are surgeons, pimps, procurers, and midwives, and so on.

Many poor country vicars, lacking other means of support, are forced to fend for themselves by becoming mountebanks, quacks, and empirical healers. And if our greedy patrons keep us on such harsh terms, as they commonly do, they will force most of us to work at a trade, as Paul did—eventually to become hired labourers, maltsters, fruit sellers, cattle rearers, or ale sellers, as some already have, or worse.

However that may be, I hope that, all things properly considered, undertaking this task involves no great error or impropriety. I can defend myself by the example of those two learned clergymen, Georg Braun and Hieronymus Henning. To borrow a line or two from my elder brother: drawn by a natural love of pictures and maps, perspective views, and the delights of describing places, the first wrote that extensive Theatre of Cities; drawn to the study of genealogies, the other composed the Genealogical Theatre. Or I can justify my studies as the Jesuit Lessius did in a similar case: I am treating a disease of the soul, which concerns a clergyman as much as a physician;

and who does not know how closely these professions agree? A good clergyman either is or ought to be a good physician—a spiritual physician, at least—as our Saviour calls himself, and indeed was: Matthew 4:23, Luke 5:18, Luke 7:8. The professions differ only in their object: one treats the body, the other the soul, and they use different medicines to cure. One heals “the soul through the body,” the other “the body through the soul,” as our Regius Professor of Medicine explained well in a learned lecture not long ago. One remedies the soul’s vices and passions—anger, lust, despair, pride, presumption, and so on—by applying spiritual medicine, while the other uses appropriate remedies for bodily diseases.

Now melancholy is an infirmity shared by body and soul, needing spiritual treatment as much as bodily treatment. I could find no more fitting occupation, no more appropriate theme—so necessary, so useful, and of such general concern to every kind of person—that belongs so equally to both professions and requires a complete physician. In this complex, mixed illness, a clergyman alone can do little; in some kinds of melancholy a physician can do much less. Together they make a complete cure. Thus each needs the other’s help.

So this subject belongs to both professions, and I hope it is not unsuitable for me: a clergyman by profession, a physician by inclination. Jupiter was in the sixth house of my horoscope. I say with Beroaldus, “I am not a physician, nor wholly ignorant of medicine.” I have taken some trouble over medical theory, with no intention of practising, but to satisfy myself. That too was one reason I first undertook this subject.

If these reasons do not satisfy you, good reader, consider Alexander the Munificent, that generous prelate, formerly bishop of Lincoln. After building six castles, he built as many religious houses, “to wash away the odium of his work,” as Mr Camden says—to remove the resentment his buildings caused and avert any scandal or accusation arising from them. William of Newburgh uses those very words of Roger, the wealthy bishop of Salisbury, who built Sherborne Castle and the castle at Devizes in King Stephen’s time. So if my discourse is too medical, or savours too much of secular learning, I promise to make amends hereafter with a theological treatise.

But I hope this will suffice once you have considered more fully the matter of my subject, “the underlying thing”—melancholy, madness—and the reasons that follow, which chiefly moved me: the disease’s prevalence, the need for a cure, and the benefit or common good that knowledge of it will bring to everyone, as the following preface will show at length.

And I do not doubt that in the end you will agree with me: to dissect this humour properly throughout every part of our human microcosm is as great a task as reconciling the chronological errors in the history of the Assyrian monarchy, finding how to square the circle, or exploring the inlets and channels of the Northeast or Northwest Passage. It is every bit as fine a discovery as that hungry Spaniard’s “Unknown Southern Land,” and as troublesome as perfecting the calculation of the motions of Mars and Mercury—which so torments our astronomers—or correcting the Gregorian calendar.

That is how I feel, for my part. Like Theophrastus with his Characters, I hope “that our descendants, my friend Polycles, will be the better for what we have written: that they will correct and put right their faults by our examples, and apply our precepts and warnings to their own use.” And just as the great commander Žižka wished a drum to be made from his skin after his death, thinking its very sound would put his enemies to flight, so I do not doubt that these following lines, when recited or read hereafter, will drive away melancholy—even after I am gone—as powerfully as Žižka’s drum could terrify his foes.

Yet let me give one passing warning to my present or future reader who is actually suffering from melancholy: do not read the descriptions of symptoms or prognoses in the treatise that follows. By applying what you read to yourself, magnifying it, and taking general statements as descriptions of your own case—as melancholy people mostly do—you may distress or harm yourself, and end up doing yourself more harm than good.