The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 1 Bad diet as a cause. Substance. The quality of foods.

Following my proposed method, having so far explained those secondary causes that are born with us, I must now proceed to the external and acquired causes that affect us after birth. These are either evident and remote, or internal, antecedent and immediate; some call the latter containing causes.

The external, remote, preceding causes are further divided into necessary and unnecessary. The necessary ones—because we cannot avoid them, and they will change us according to their use or misuse—are the six non-natural things so often discussed by physicians, which are principal causes of this disease.

In almost every consultation, when physicians discuss the causes, they find a fault and usually bring this charge against the patient: “He has offended in the six non-natural things.” He has invariably gone wrong in one of the six. Montanus, consulted about a melancholy Jew in consultation 22, pronounces that judgement, as does Frisemelica in the same case. In consultation 244, assessing a melancholy soldier, he assigns this reason for the illness: “He offended in all six non-natural things, which were the external causes from which those internal obstructions arose.” The same holds for the other cases.

Of these six non-natural things, diet and retention and evacuation are more directly material than the others, because they create new matter or concern its retention or expulsion. The other four are air, exercise, sleeping and waking, and disturbances of the mind, which only alter the matter.

The first is diet, consisting of food and drink. It causes melancholy when it is at fault in substance or in its attributes—that is, quantity, quality or the like. It may well be called a material cause, since, as Fernel holds, it has such power to generate diseases and supply their matter and nourishment. Neither air nor disturbances of the mind nor any other evident causes take effect or produce this result unless the bodily constitution and disposition of the humours cooperate. One may therefore say that diet is the mother of diseases, whoever their father may be; from this alone melancholy and many other illnesses arise.

Many physicians, I admit, have written extensive volumes on this single subject, the nature and qualities of every kind of food: Galen; Isaac the Jew, Haly Abbas, Avicenna and Mesue, four Arab writers; Gordonius; Villanovanus; Wecker; Jean Bruyérin, in his treatise on food and drink; Michele Savonarola, tract 2, chapter 8; Antonio Fumanelli, in his book on the regimen of the elderly; and Curio, in his commentary on the School of Salerno.

There are also Godefridus Stekius, in The Art of Medicine; Marsilius Cognatus; Ficino; Ranzovius; Fonseca; Lessius; Magninus, in his Regimen of Health; Frietagius; Hugo Fridevallius; and others, besides many writers in English. Almost every individual physician discusses particular foods at length in his chapter on melancholy.

But because these books are not available to everyone, I will briefly indicate which kinds of food, in their several varieties, generate this humour and which should be avoided. Fernel and others will show you how they alter and change the matter—first the spirits and then the humours by which we are sustained—and our bodily constitution. I hurry on to the subject itself, beginning with food that is harmful in its substance.