In such cases compound medicines deserve approval, and Arnoldus allows them in his eighteenth aphorism: “If simples cannot do the work, necessity compels us to use compounds.” As for recipes and special formulations, “one day teaches another”—one day instructs the next. They resemble words and phrases, “the words now held in honour, if usage so wills.” They ebb and flow with the season, and as minds differ, so they can be endlessly varied.

Everyone has a favourite that captivates him.

Each man follows his own liking: as many minds as men, yet all working towards a good end, though by different paths. Like the other arts and sciences, medicine continues to improve. “The hours are the nurses of the Muses,” and experience teaches us every day many things our predecessors did not know. Nature, as he says, is not exhausted, nor so lavish as to bestow all her gifts on a single age. She has kept some for posterity, to show her power and prove that she is still the same, neither aged nor spent.

Birds and beasts can cure themselves by nature: “Through natural experience they commonly know things that human beings scarcely attain through long labour and learning.” But people must work hard and diligently to discover them. Yet I digress.

Compound medicines are taken internally or applied externally. Those taken internally are either liquid or solid; liquids are either fluid or thick. Fluids include wines and syrups. The wines ordinarily used for this disease are wormwood wine, tamarisk wine and buglossatum, a wine made from borage and bugloss. Arnoldus Villanovanus, in his Book of Wines, specifies its composition: borage, balm, bugloss, cinnamon and so on. It is highly praised for its powers:

“It drives away leprosy and scabs, clears the blood, refreshes the spirits, cheers the mind, purges the brain of those distressing black melancholic fumes, and cleanses the whole body of that black humour through the urine. To this I add,” says Villanovanus, “that it will restore reason to mad people and to raging lunatics who have been put in chains.”

“My conscience is my witness that I do not lie. I saw a respectable matron helped in this way. She was so irritable, and sometimes so furious, that she was almost mad and beside herself; she did not know what she was saying or doing, scolded and beat her maids, and was about to be bound. Then she drank this borage wine and was cured by that excellent remedy, which a poor stranger, a humble beggar going from door to door for alms, happened to teach her.”

Clarified borage juice drunk in wine will do as much, as will the sliced and steeped roots and so on, says Antoine Mizauld in The Art of Medicine. He quotes this story word for word from Villanovanus, as does Magninus, a physician of Milan, in his Regimen of Health.

I find another excellent compound water in Rubeus, On Distillation, section 3. Citing Savonarola, he praises it highly “for those who are solitary, dull, dejected or sad without cause, or troubled by trembling of the heart.” In the same place he cites other excellent compound waters for melancholy, “provided their melancholy is not inflamed and their bodily constitution is not too hot.” Evonimus has a valuable aqua vitae for this purpose, for those of a cold constitution.

But he and most other writers recommend potable gold; and every writer prescribes clarified whey, especially from goat’s milk, with borage, bugloss, endive, chicory and so on. Some prescribe it at any time without restriction; others prescribe a good draught every morning before eating for thirty consecutive days in spring. Syrups are very good and often used to prepare this humour for evacuation from the heart, spleen, liver and other parts. These include syrup of borage—Laurentius highly praises a famous borage syrup for this purpose in his Treatise on Melancholy—King Sabor’s apple syrup, now obsolete, and syrups of thyme, dodder of thyme, hops, scolopendria, fumitory, maidenhair, Bizantine and so on.

These are mostly used to prepare for other medicines, mixed with distilled waters of the same nature or otherwise made into juleps. Thick preparations are conserves or confections: conserves of borage, bugloss, balm, fumitory, chicory, maidenhair, violets, roses, wormwood and so on; confections such as theriac, mithridate, eclegms or linctures, and the like.

Solid preparations include aromatic confections. The hot ones are Diambra, Diamargaritum calidum, Dianthus, Diamoschum dulce, Electuarium de gemmis, the cheering preparation of Galen and Rhazes, Diagalinga, Diacimynum, Dianisum, Diatrion piperion, Diazinziber, Diacapers and Diacinnamonum. The cold ones include Diamargaritum frigidum, Diacorolli, Diarrhodon Abbatis, Diacodion and so on, as any pharmacopoeia will show you, together with the tablets or lozenges made from them, candied preparations and the like.

External preparations, used as occasion requires, include amulets and oils, hot and cold: oils of chamomile, stoechas, violets, roses, almonds, poppy, water lily, mandrake and so on, for use after bathing or to bring on sleep. Ointments are compounded from those ingredients, oils, wax and the like, such as Alablastritum Populeum. Some are hot and some cold, to moisten, induce sleep and remedy other symptoms.

Liniments are made from the same materials for the same purposes. Plasters consist of herbs, flowers, roots and so on, mixed and boiled together with oils and other liquids. Cataplasms, salves or poultices are made from fresh herbs, pounded or boiled in water until soft, and applied to the upper abdominal regions and other parts when the body is empty.

Wax-based dressings are applied to various parts, and forehead dressings used to relieve pain, distress and heat, or to bring on sleep. There are fomentations, or sponges soaked in decoctions and similar liquids; epithems, moist medicines laid on linen to bathe and cool the affected parts; and sacculi, little bags of herbs, flowers, seeds, roots and the like, applied to the head, heart, stomach and other parts. There are also scented substances, scent balls, perfumes and bouquets to smell. Each has its particular use in melancholy, as I will show when I discuss the treatment of its distinct kinds separately.