The Anatomy of Melancholy

Weyer attributes all those famous transformations to imagination. That sufferers from hydrophobia seem constantly to see the image of a dog in their urine; that melancholy and sick people conceive so many fantastic visions and apparitions, entertaining such absurd images as that they are kings, lords, cocks, bears, apes or owls; that they are heavy, light, transparent, large or small, without sensation or dead, as will be shown more fully in our sections on symptoms: all this can be attributed only to a corrupted, false and violent imagination.

It works not only in sick and melancholy people, but sometimes with the greatest force in those who are healthy, suddenly making them ill and altering their constitution in an instant. Sometimes, too, a strong idea or impression will remove diseases, as Valesius demonstrates: in either direction it produces real effects. If people merely see someone else trembling, dizzy or sick with some fearful disease, their apprehension and fear are so strong that they develop that same disease.

Or if some soothsayer, wise man, fortune-teller or physician tells them they will have a particular disease, they take the prediction so much to heart that they immediately suffer from it. This is familiar in China, says Ricci the Jesuit: if people are told they will be ill on a certain day, when that day comes they will certainly be ill, and so terribly afflicted that they sometimes die of it.

Dr Cotta, in chapter 8 of his Discovery of Ignorant Practitioners of Medicine, has two strange stories showing what imagination can do. One concerns a parson’s wife in Northamptonshire in 1607. She went to a physician, who told her that he thought she was suffering from sciatica, a disease she did not have. That very night, after returning home, she suffered a severe attack of sciatica because of his words. He gives a similar example of another housewife troubled by cramp, which she acquired in the same way merely because her physician named it.

Sometimes the force of imagination causes death itself. I have heard of someone who happened to come into the company of a man thought to have the plague, although he did not, and suddenly fell down dead. Another fell ill with the plague through the mere thought of it. One person faints at the sight of his companion being bled. Another, Cardan says on Aristotle’s authority, fell down dead merely from seeing a man hanged—as commonly happens to women at any ghastly sight.

A Jewish man in France, says Luis Vives, happened to cross a dangerous passage, a plank laid over a brook, in the dark without coming to harm. The next day, realizing the danger he had been in, he fell down dead. Many will not believe such stories, but usually laugh and scoff when they hear them. Yet let them consider, as Peter Byarus illustrates the point, that if they were made to walk on a plank high above the ground, they would grow dizzy, though they would confidently walk on the same plank at ground level.

Many men otherwise stout-hearted, says Agrippa, tremble at such sights, become dizzy and feel sick merely from looking down from a high place. And what affects them except an idea in the mind? Just as some are troubled in this way by imagination, others are as easily restored by imagination alone and a favourable expectation.