The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 6. Parents as a cause through inheritance.

The other inward, inborn cause of melancholy is the constitution, wholly or partly, that we receive from our parents. Fernel calls it “contrary to nature,” or unnatural, since it is a hereditary disease. As he maintains: “As is the seed of the parents, especially the father, so become the uniform tissues and parts formed from the seed; whatever disease the father suffers when he begets a child, he passes on with the seed to his offspring.”

As the father’s constitution is, so is the son’s; whatever disease the father had when he fathered him, the son will have after him, inheriting his infirmities as surely as his lands. Where the father’s temperament and constitution are corrupt, says Roger Bacon, the son’s temperament and constitution must likewise be corrupt, and so the corruption passes from father to son.

Now this appears less in the body’s structure—according to the saying of Hippocrates—in build, proportions, scars and other features, than in the mind’s manners and dispositions:

And with the seed, fathers’ ways pass to their sons.

Seleucus had an anchor-shaped mark on his thigh, and so did his descendants, as Trogus records in book 15. Lepidus, in Pliny, book 7, chapter 17, had poor eyesight, and so did his son. The famous family of the Ahenobarbi were known in antiquity, and took their surname, from their red beards. The Austrian lip and those Indians’ flat noses are inherited, as are the Bavarian chin and prominent eyes among Jews, as Buxtorf observes.

Their voice, gait, gestures and looks are likewise passed down, with all their other qualities and infirmities: like mother, like daughter. Lemnius maintains that their very emotions follow their seed, and that children’s malice and bad dispositions must often be blamed entirely on their parents. I therefore need have no doubt that melancholy is a hereditary disease.

Paracelsus expressly affirms it in On the Diseases of the Mentally Disturbed, volume 4, treatise 1; so does Crato in a letter to Monavius, and Bruno Seidel in his book On Incurable Disease. Montalto, chapter 11, argues from Hippocrates and Plutarch that such hereditary dispositions are common. Speaking of a patient, he says: “I believe this comes about from an inherited melancholic imbalance.” I think he became so by sharing in melancholy.

Daniel Sennert, book 1, part 2, chapter 9, maintains that this melancholic constitution passes not only from father to son but sometimes through the whole family: “Sometimes hereditary in entire families.” Forestus, in his Medical Observations, illustrates the point with a merchant, his patient, who had inherited this infirmity. So does Rodrigo de Fonseca, volume 1, consultation 69, with the case of a young man affected “through a melancholy mother”—he had a melancholy mother—“and a melancholy-producing diet,” a bad diet as well.