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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Member 2 Bodily Deformity, Sickness, Low Birth, and Particular Discontents

MEMBER 2 Bodily deformity, sickness, low birth, and particular discontents

Particular discontents and grievances concern the body, the mind, or one’s circumstances. By wounding the human soul, they produce melancholy and many serious troubles; the antidote of good counsel and persuasion may ease or remove them.

Bodily deformities and impairments—lameness, curvature, deafness, blindness, whether present from birth or acquired—torment many people. Yet this may comfort them: these bodily impairments do not blemish the soul in the least or hinder its workings, but rather help and greatly strengthen it. Your body may be lame and look deformed, yet this does not prevent you from being good, wise, upright, and honourable.

“Honour and beauty seldom dwell together,” says Plutarch, and an excellent understanding often lies beneath a threadbare coat: “Wisdom often hides beneath worn clothing.”

When Cornelio Musso, the famous Italian preacher, first entered the pulpit in Venice, his appearance—a small, thin, poor, downcast figure—so lowered him in his listeners’ esteem that they were all ready to leave the church. But when they heard him speak, they marvelled at him; the senator who could enjoy his company or be first to invite him home counted himself fortunate.

A man who looks insignificant may have more intelligence, learning, and integrity than someone who struts about “flaunting bombast,” and “taking grand strides,” and wins the world’s admiration. “A humble jar often holds noble nectar”: the best wine comes from an old vessel.

How many princes, kings, emperors, philosophers, and orators with bodily deformities could I name? Hannibal had one eye; Appius Claudus and Timoleon were blind, as were Muleasses, king of Tunis, John, king of Bohemia, and the prophet Tiresias. “Night has its pleasures.” For the loss of that one sense, such people are commonly compensated in the others: they have excellent memories and other abilities, music and many recreations, much happiness and great wisdom, as Cicero explains so well in his Tusculan Disputations. Homer was blind, yet who, he asks, ever produced more accurate, vivid, or better descriptions with both eyes?

Democritus was blind, yet, as Laertius writes of him, he saw more than all the rest of Greece. As Plato concludes, “The mind’s eye begins to see keenly as soon as the bodily eye loses its bloom”: when our bodily eyes are at their worst, the eyes of our soul generally see best. Some philosophers and theologians have castrated themselves or deliberately put out their eyes to contemplate better.

Angelo Poliziano had a skin eruption in his nose that continually discharged and made his company offensive; yet no one was more eloquent or pleasing in his works. Aesop was crooked; Socrates short-sighted, long-legged, and hairy; Democritus shrivelled; Seneca thin, rough-featured, and ugly to look at. Yet show me as many brilliant minds, such inspired spirits! Horace was a little, bleary-eyed, contemptible fellow, yet who was more full of wise sayings? Marsilio Ficino and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples were a pair of dwarfs; Melanchthon was short and ill-favoured—“he was small, but he was great,” and so on—yet all three possessed incomparable abilities.

Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, was wounded in the leg at the siege of Pamplona, the chief town of Navarre in Spain. Unfit for war and less useful at court, he turned after that accident to his prayer beads. By doing so he gained more honour than he ever would have gained through the use of his limbs and his handsome appearance. “A wound does not penetrate the soul”: a wound does not hurt the soul.

The emperor Galba had a crooked back; Epictetus was lame; Alexander the Great was small in stature; Augustus Caesar was of the same height. Agesilaus had an unimpressive appearance. Boccharis was as misshapen a prince as Egypt ever had, yet, as Diodorus Siculus records, he far surpassed his predecessors in wisdom and knowledge.

In AD 1306 Vladislaus Cubitalis, that tiny king of Poland, reigned and fought more victorious battles than any of his long-legged predecessors. “Virtue rejects no stature”: virtue refuses no stature. Commonly, those great hulking bodies and fine features house foolish, dull, leaden spirits.

What is in them? “What but sluggish bulk and the fierceness of a foolish mind?” What was in Osus and Ephialtes, Neptune’s sons in Homer, nine acres tall?

Who, like great Orion, When he walks through the deepest waters of Nereus, Cleaving a path, towers shoulder-high above the waves,

What was in Maximinus, Ajax, Caligula, and the rest of those great Zanzummins or gigantic Anakims, heavy, enormous, uncouth louts?

If the Fates give you enormous limbs, Do you lack intelligence?

Their body, says Lemnius, is a burden to them; their spirits are less lively, and they are less alert and cheerful. “There is not a grain of wit in that great body.” A little diamond is worth more than a rocky mountain.

This made Alexander of Aphrodisias conclude positively: the smaller the person, the wiser, because the soul is more concentrated in such a body. Let Bodin, in chapter 5 of his Method of History, argue the rest. The smaller people are, as in Asia and Greece, the finer their minds generally are.

6471.The 1651 page prints “antitode”; the modern column gives the intended “antidote.” Member 2 begins here, with its original heading, though the discussion of low birth belongs to a later portion.

6472.Burton argues that bodily impairment does not diminish moral or intellectual worth. His stronger claim that it enhances the soul, and his later claims of compensating abilities, belong to his consolatory reasoning. His descriptions of bodies and appearances retain the assumptions and vocabulary of his time.

6476.Cornelius Mussus is the Italian preacher Cornelio Musso. Burton cites a life by Josephus Mussus, here rendered Giuseppe Musso. The anecdote’s details have been preserved, but the particular biographical passage remains uncollated.

6477.“Silly” here means insignificant or unimpressive in appearance. “Ampullis” evokes swelling, inflated language. The Latin image is a lowly jar containing fine wine; Burton’s separate English gloss changes “lowly” to “old,” and both senses are preserved.

6480.Burton’s Appius Claudus denotes the Roman statesman usually named Appius Claudius Caecus. His list mixes historical and legendary examples; Tiresias is the mythical seer. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.113–115, discusses blindness, including Homer’s descriptive power. Burton’s further biographical particulars remain to be collated.

6482.Plato, Symposium 219a, contrasts the eye of the mind with declining bodily sight. The 1651 margin prints In Convivio lib.25, not a usual modern reference for this dialogue. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.114, also discusses Democritus’s intellectual vision; Burton here names Laertius. “Evirated” means castrated. His claims of voluntary mutilation are reported as his historical exempla, without identifying unspecified individuals.

6484.“Tetter” is an old term for a skin eruption, without a precise modern diagnosis; “fulsome” means offensive or repulsive, and “hard favoured” means ill-favoured in appearance. The names are Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, and Philipp Melanchthon. “Parts” means abilities; “all three” refers to Ficino, Lefèvre, and Melanchthon. The biographical descriptions and Camerarius reference await detailed collation.

6487.“Betook himself to his beads” means turning to prayer or devotional life; “propernes of person” means handsome appearance. The Latin maxim and Burton’s English gloss are both retained in modern form. The abbreviated Ribera and Macrobius references have not yet been securely located.

6490.“Pitch” means height. Suetonius, Augustus 79, calls Augustus short, though proportionate; he does not there equate his height with Alexander’s. Diodorus 1.65.1 contrasts Bocchoris’s unimpressive appearance with exceptional sagacity. The comparison supports Burton’s contrast, without establishing his stronger physical description or the whole catalogue. Agesilaus’s Latin description means unattractive in appearance. These are received examples, not independently verified medical diagnoses.

6492.Vladislaus Cubitalis is the king’s Latin name, literally Vladislaus the Cubit-high; the margin plays on small stature and greatness. The date 1306 and the claim about his victories are retained as printed. The next sentence turns from defending short stature to a sweeping attack on large bodies.

6494.The Ovidian line occurs in Halieutica 59, describing a bear. Burton applies it to large-bodied people; his stolidaque differs from the consulted stolidæque. Osus is the form printed for the giant generally called Otus; the extraordinary measure “nine acres” is also retained rather than silently corrected.

6496.Compare Virgil, Aeneid 10.763–765, the comparison of Mezentius to Orion. Burton prints Qui ut for Virgil’s quam and findens for scindens. Nereus, a sea-god, stands for the sea. The three displayed lines follow Burton’s text and lineation.

6497.The Zanzummins and Anakims are biblical giant peoples. Burton combines them with classical figures to ridicule impressive bulk without corresponding intelligence. “Lubbers” means clumsy or uncouth louts; the following verse invokes the Fates who allot human lives.

6499.Compare Catullus 86.4, which denies a grain of charm or wit to a large body. Burton adapts that line to intelligence. “Spirits” here belongs to early modern accounts of bodily and mental animation; “erect” means alert or vigorous.

6501.Alexander of Aphrodisias was an interpreter of Aristotle; Bodin’s work is his Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. The compression of the soul and the geographical generalization are arguments reported by Burton. Neither is silently recast as a modern explanation of intelligence.