The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 3. The Material of Melancholy

There is much disagreement between Avicenna and Galen about the material of melancholy. You may read about it in Cardan’s Contradictions, Valesius’s Controversies, Montanus, Prosper Calenus, Capivaccius, Bright and Ficino. They have devoted either whole treatises or extensive discussions to it in their various works on this subject.

What this humour is, where it comes from and how it is generated in the body have not been adequately discussed by Galen or any ancient writer, Iacchinus thinks; nor can recent writers agree. Montanus, in his consultations, holds melancholy to be either material or immaterial, and Arculanus agrees. Material melancholy is natural: it is one of the four humours already mentioned.

Immaterial melancholy is adventitious, acquired, excessive, unnatural or artificially produced. Hercules de Saxonia places it in the spirits alone and derives it from an imbalance of heat, cold, dryness or moisture that alters the brain and its functions without material substance. Paracelsus entirely rejects and mocks this division into four humours and temperaments, but our Galenists generally approve it and subscribe to Montanus’s opinion.

Material melancholy is either simple or mixed. It causes harm through its quantity or quality and varies according to where it settles—the brain, spleen, mesenteric veins, heart, womb or stomach. Or it differs according to the mixture of the natural humours with one another, or of the four unnatural, burnt humours, as these are blended in different proportions.

If natural melancholy, which is cold and dry, abounds in the body beyond what it can comfortably bear, the body must become disordered and diseased, says Faventinus. The other kind, if corrupted, produces similar effects, whether it arises from that other melancholy of burnt choler or from blood. As Montalto argues, if it comes from the burning of humours, it is usually hot and dry.

I find some disagreement about whether this melancholy substance can be generated from all four humours, and about its colour and temperament. Galen holds that it can be generated from only three, excluding phlegm. Valesius and Menardus firmly uphold his assertion as true, as do Fuchs, Montalto and Montanus. How, they ask, can white become black? But Hercules de Saxonia, in chapter 8 of his posthumous book on melancholy, and Cardan take the opposite side.

It can be generated from phlegm, though this rarely happens. Guianerius and Laurentius, chapter 1, agree, as does Melanchthon in the chapter on humours in his book On the Soul. He calls it asinine—dull, swinish melancholy—and says that he has seen it himself. Wecker takes the same view.

One kind arises from burnt black bile; another, the most brutish, from choler; another, dull in character, from phlegm; and the last, the best, from blood. Some are cold and dry, others hot and dry, varying with their mixtures as these are intensified or weakened.