The Anatomy of Melancholy

So in Poland, says Alexander Gaguinus, the best servant and worthiest fellow is the one who drinks most toasts in his master’s honour. He will be rewarded as a good servant, and the man who holds his liquor best will be considered the finest fellow—although a brewer’s horse will carry far more than any hardened drinker.

Yet for his noble exploits of this sort he will be considered a most valiant man, for “a man can show as much courage at a feast as in war”—there is as much valour in feasting as in fighting. Some of our city captains and carpet knights will uphold and prove that. Thus they often wilfully upset the healthy balance of their bodies, stifle their wits, choke nature and sink to the level of beasts.

Others go to the opposite extreme and bring this harm upon themselves through an excessively formal, strict diet. They are over-particular, like pampered weaklings, and fussy about their foods and mealtimes: as that Static Medicine prescribes, exactly so many ounces at dinner, as Lessius commands, so much at supper, neither a little more nor a little less, of such-and-such a food, at such-and-such hours.

A medicinal drink in the morning; broth of cockerel, broth of China root; at dinner, plum broth, a chicken, a rabbit, a rib from a rack of mutton, a capon’s wing, a hen’s wishbone portion, and so forth. For healthier bodies this is excessively fussy and utterly absurd.

Others err by fasting too much: starving by day, says Guaineri, and staying awake at night, as many Moors and Turks do in our own time. Hermits, monks and the rest of that superstitious order have often gone mad through excessive fasting, as the same Guaineri testifies that he has frequently seen happen in his time.

Perhaps Hippocrates means such people in aphorism 1.5, when he says that those on an over-restricted diet suffer more from lapses and are more badly harmed than those who eat freely and are on the verge of overeating.