The Anatomy of Melancholy

Montanus, consultation 55; Trincavelius, book 3, consultations 36 and 37; Fernelius, consultation 43; Frambesarius, book 1 of consultations, consultation 17; Hildesheim, Claudinus and others provide examples of every particular. The distinctive symptoms belonging to each part are these. If it proceeds from the stomach, says Savanarola, the stomach is full of pain and wind. Guianerius adds vertigo, nausea, much spitting, and so on. If from the abdominal wall, there is swelling and wind in the hypochondria, nausea, an urge to vomit and an upward pulling.

If from the heart, there is aching and trembling of that organ, with much heaviness. If from the liver, there is usually pain in the right hypochondrium. If from the spleen, hardness and pain in the left hypochondrium, rumbling, a strong appetite and poor digestion: Avicenna. If, on the other hand, from the mesenteric veins and liver, there is little or no appetite: Hercules de Saxonia. If from the hypochondria, there is swelling with rumbling, impaired digestion, frequent belching, and so on.

From this undigested matter, windy vapours rise to the brain, disturbing the imagination and causing fear, sorrow, dullness, heaviness and many terrifying notions and chimeras. As Lemnius aptly observes in book 1, chapter 16, just as a thick black cloud covers the Sun and intercepts its beams and light, so this melancholic vapour clouds the mind and forces it into many absurd thoughts and imaginings. Rising to the brain from the lower parts like smoke from a chimney, it compels good, wise, honest and judicious people to become deluded, and to say and do things unworthy of their persons, occupations and wisdom.

Because of those rising vapours, cramps and rumblings below, one person cannot be persuaded that he does not have a serpent—a viper—in his guts; another believes he has frogs. Trallianus tells of a woman who imagined that she had swallowed an eel or a serpent. Felix Platerus, in book 1 of his Observations, gives a most memorable example of a fellow countryman who happened to fall into a pit containing frogs and frogspawn. Having swallowed a little of the water, he began to suspect that he had also swallowed frogspawn. With that notion and fear, his imagination worked so strongly that he truly thought he had young live frogs in his belly, “which lived on his own food”—which lived by his nourishment. He was so firmly convinced that for many years afterwards his belief could not be corrected.

He studied medicine for seven years to cure himself, travelled to Italy, France and Germany to consult the best physicians about it, and in 1609 sought Platerus’s advice among the rest. Platerus told him it was wind, a notion of his, and so on; but “he stubbornly contradicted him and tried to prove it both orally and in writing.” Nothing anyone said would do: it was no wind, but real frogs. “And do you not hear them croak?” Platerus would have tricked him by putting live frogs into his excrement; but, being a physician himself, he would not be deceived. He was “otherwise a prudent and learned man,” a wise and learned man otherwise, a doctor of medicine; and after seven years of this delusion, “he was freed from the fantasy”: he was cured. Laurentius and Goulart provide many such examples, if you wish to read them.