The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Midianites were terrified in this way by Gideon’s soldiers, each doing no more than breaking a pitcher; and Hannibal’s army was routed by a similar panic at the walls of Rome. The empress Livia, hearing a few tragic verses recited from Virgil—“You shall be Marcellus,” and so on—fell down as though dead in a swoon.

Edinus, king of Denmark, was driven into a frenzy, together with all his men, by a sudden sound he heard: Krantz, Danish History, book 5, and Alessandro Alessandri, book 3, chapter 5. Amatus Lusitanus had a patient who became epileptic on receiving bad news, in his second hundred cases, cure 90. Cardano, On Subtlety, book 18, saw someone who lost his reason through misunderstanding an echo.

If one sense alone can cause such violent upheavals of the mind, what must we think when hearing, sight and the other senses are all disturbed at once, as in earthquakes, thunder, lightning, storms and the like? At Bologna in Italy, in 1504, there was so frightening an earthquake at about eleven at night, as Beroaldo has recorded for posterity in his book On the Earthquake, that the whole city shook. People thought the world was ending, “that humankind was finished.” It made such a fearful noise and such a disgusting smell that the inhabitants were utterly terrified, and some went mad.

“Hear a dreadful event, worthy to be recorded in the annals,” my author adds: hear a strange story, worthy to be chronicled. At that time I had a servant called Fulco Argelanus, a bold and handsome man, who was so grievously frightened by it that he first became melancholy, then lost his judgement, and finally went mad and killed himself.

At Fuscinum in Japan there was such a sudden earthquake and darkness that many people suffered headaches, and many were overwhelmed by grief and melancholy. At Meacum, whole streets and splendid palaces were overturned at the same time. There was so hideous a noise, like thunder, and so foul a smell, that their hair stood on end with fear and their hearts shook; people and animals were terrified beyond belief. In Sacai, another city, the same earthquake was so dreadful that many lost their senses, while others were so stunned by the horrible spectacle that they did not know what they were doing.

Blasius, a Christian who reported the news, was so frightened himself that, even two months later, he had scarcely recovered his composure and could not drive the memory from his mind. Often, years afterwards, people tremble afresh at the memory or idea of such a dreadful thing, even throughout their lives, whenever it is mentioned.

Cornelius Agrippa repeats from William of Paris the story of a man so affected by an unpleasant purge prescribed by a physician that the mere sight of medicine upset him, even if he did not so much as smell it. Long afterwards, the medicine box itself would purge his bowels; indeed, the very memory of it had the same effect.

It is like travellers and sailors, says Plutarch, who, once they have run aground or struck a rock, ever afterwards fear not only that particular misfortune but all dangers of that kind.