The Anatomy of Melancholy

A body burdened with yesterday’s excesses weighs down the mind as well.

The body is “the soul’s dwelling,” her house, abode and support. Just as a torch gives a better light and a sweeter smell according to the material from which it is made, so our soul performs all her actions better or worse according to the condition of her organs. Or, as wine takes on the flavour of the cask in which it is kept, the soul receives a tinge from the body through which she works.

We see this in old men, children, Europeans, Asians, and hot and cold climates. Sanguine people are merry, melancholic people sad, phlegmatic people dull, because of the abundance of those humours; and they cannot resist the passions these impose upon them.

For, in this weakness of human nature, as Melanchthon declares, the understanding is so bound to and held captive by its lower senses that it cannot perform its functions without their help. The weakened will has little power to restrain those outward parts, but allows herself to be overruled by them.

So I must conclude with Lemnius that “spirits and humours hold the greatest power to harm”: spirits and humours do the greatest harm in disturbing the soul. How can a man help being choleric and angry when his body is so clogged with an abundance of thick humours? Or melancholy when he is so disposed within? That this malady, madness, apoplexies, lethargies and so on arise from this cannot, then, be denied.

Now this body of ours is generally disordered by some preceding diseases, which trouble its internal organs and instruments, and so, as a consequence, cause melancholy, according to the agreement of the most highly regarded physicians.

This humour—as Avicenna, book 3, fen 1, treatise 4, chapter 18; Arnoldus, Breviary, book 1, chapter 18; Jacchinus, commentary on book 9 of Rhazes, chapter 15; Montalto, chapter 10; Nicolas Le Pois, chapter On Melancholy; and others suppose—is generated by a disorder of some internal part, either inborn or remaining after an inflammation, or else is contained in the blood after a fever or some other malignant disease.

This opinion agrees with Galen’s, On the Affected Parts, book 3, chapter 6. Guaineri gives an example of someone whose condition was caused by a quartan fever; and Montanus, consultation 32, describes a young man of twenty-eight who became disordered in this way after a quartan fever that had troubled him for five years.

Hildesheim, gleaning 2, On Madness, tells of a German baron grievously tormented with melancholy after a long fever. Galen, On Black Bile, chapter 4, gives plague as a cause; Botaldus, On Venereal Disease, chapter 2, gives the French pox; others give frenzy, epilepsy and apoplexy, because those diseases often develop into this one.

I have already spoken of the suppression of haemorrhoidal bleeding, haemorrhage or nosebleeds, the retention of menstrual flow—though these deserve fuller explanation, as the sole cause of a distinct kind of melancholy in older unmarried women, nuns and widows, treated separately by Rodrigo de Castro and Mercado, as I have indicated elsewhere—or any other discharge being stopped.