The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 2 The quantity of food as a cause

Less harm comes from the substance and quality of food itself, or from poor cooking and preparation, than from its quantity, irregular times and places, eating at unsuitable hours, lack of moderation, and taking too much or too little. It is a true saying: “Gluttony kills more than the sword.” This gluttony kills more than the sword—this “all-devouring appetite and murderous gullet,” this all-devouring, murderous gut.

And Pliny’s saying is truer still: a simple diet is best; piling up different foods is harmful, and sauces are worse; many dishes bring many diseases. Avicenna declares that nothing is worse than eating many dishes or prolonging meals beyond the usual time. From this come our ailments; it is the source of all diseases arising from the conflict of thick humours.

From this, says Fernel, come undigested matter, wind, obstructions, corrupt humours, an excess of humours, a wasted constitution and slow digestion. “Hence sudden deaths, and old age dying without a will”—sudden death, and so forth, and what else besides!

As a lamp is choked with too much oil, or a small fire put out altogether by too much wood, so excessive eating stifles the body’s natural heat. “An insatiable belly is a deadly cesspool”: as one writer says, an insatiable paunch is a harmful sink and the source of every disease of body and mind.

Mercurialis regards it as a specific cause of this particular disease. Solenander, in consultation 5, section 3, illustrates Mercurialis’s point with the case of someone made melancholy “by ill-timed revels”—feasting at unsuitable hours. Crato confirms this in that often-cited consultation 21, book 2, naming excessive eating as a principal cause.

But why should I look further for evidence? Listen to Hippocrates himself, book 2, aphorism 10: the more impure bodies are nourished, the more they are harmed, because corrupt humours putrefy their nourishment.

Yet despite all the harm that plainly follows overeating and drunkenness, see how extravagantly and madly we indulge in them. Read what Johannes Stuckius has lately written on the subject in his great volume On the Banquets of the Ancients, and about our own age: “What monstrous dinners!”—prodigious suppers; “while inviting people to dinner, they carry them out to the grave.” What gluttons, Epicures, Apiciuses and Heliogabaluses our age supplies! Lucullus’s ghost still walks, and everyone longs to dine in the Apollo room; Aesop’s costly dish is served up every day.

“What costs more gives greater pleasure.”

The most expensive delicacies are best. It is commonplace to spend twenty or thirty pounds on one dish and some thousand crowns on a dinner. Mully-Hamet, king of Fez and Morocco, spent three pounds on the sauce for a capon. That is nothing in our day: we scorn everything cheap.