The Anatomy of Melancholy

Such beer may be stronger, but it is less wholesome than other beer. As Joubert rightly establishes from Galen in his Paradoxes, decade 1, paradox 5, boiling such impure waters does not cleanse or purify them. Pliny, book 31, chapter 3, holds the same view, as do Pietro de’ Crescenzi, Agriculture, book 1 and book 4, chapters 11 and 45, and Pamphilius Herilachus, On the Nature of Waters, book 4: such waters are bad and should not be used.

According to Galen, they produce fevers, dropsies, pleurisies, disorders of the spleen and melancholy, damage the eyes, and cause a bad temperament and an unhealthy condition throughout the body, with a poor complexion. Joubert firmly maintains this in his Paradoxes, book 1, part 5: such water causes bleary eyes, a poor complexion and many loathsome diseases in those who use it.

What they say accords with sound reason: for, as geographers relate, the water of Astrakhan breeds worms in those who drink it. The Axius, now called Verduri, the finest river in Macedonia, turns all cattle black if they taste it. The Aleacman, now Peleca, another stream in Thessaly, turns cattle mostly white, “if you lead them there to drink.”

Johann Boemus attributes the struma, or swelling of the neck, among the Bavarians and Styrians to the nature of their waters, as Münster does among the people of Valais in the Alps. Bodin supposes that the stuttering of some families in Aquitaine around Labden comes from the same cause, and that the impurity passes from the water into their bodies.

Thus those who use filthy, stagnant, discoloured, thick, muddy water must necessarily have muddy, discoloured, impure and weak bodies. And because the body acts upon the mind, they will have coarser understandings and dull, foggy, melancholy spirits, and be truly subject to every kind of infirmity.

To these harmful single ingredients we may add an infinite number of mixed, artificially prepared dishes, of which our cooks supply as great a variety as tailors supply fashions in our clothes. Such are puddings stuffed with blood or otherwise compounded; baked dishes; pickled, hardened, fried and grilled foods; buttered foods, preserved, salted and excessively dried foods;

all cakes, simnels, buns and crisp biscuits made with butter, spices and so forth; fritters, pancakes, pies, sausages and the various sharp or excessively sweet sauces. With these, the “science of the cookshop,” as Seneca calls it, has served up those Apician refinements and perfumed dishes that Pope Adrian VI found so astonishing in the accounts of his predecessor Leo X, and that monstrous excess and extravagance have invented in this age.

These generally produce thick humours, fill the stomach with undigested matter and all the internal organs with obstructions. Montanus, consultation 22, gives the example of a melancholy Jew who became melancholy and unwell through eating such tart sauces, prepared dishes and salted foods, in which he took excessive pleasure. Such examples are familiar and common.