The Anatomy of Melancholy

Although our usual air is good, whether by nature or human art, it is still useful, as I have said, to change it regularly. There is no better medicine for a melancholy person than a change of air and a variety of places: travelling abroad and seeing different customs. Leo Africanus speaks of many of his countrymen cured in this way without any other medicine. Among the Black Africans, he says, the air is so excellent that anyone who falls sick elsewhere and is brought there recovers immediately, something he often witnessed himself.

Lipsius, Zwinger, and others say as much of ordinary travel. No one, says Lipsius in a letter to his noble friend Philip Lannoy, who was preparing for a journey, can be such a block of wood or stone that the delightful sight of countries, cities, towns, and rivers fails to move him. The philosopher Seneca was immensely pleased to see Scipio Africanus’s house near Liternum and to inspect its old buildings, cisterns, baths, tombs, and so forth.

And how Cicero delighted in the sight of Athens, looking at its ancient and beautiful buildings while remembering their distinguished inhabitants! Paulus Aemilius, the renowned Roman commander, after conquering Perseus, the last king of Macedonia, and ending his long wars, made a pleasant tour throughout Greece at the beginning of autumn, as Livy describes. He had been long absent from Rome and was much missed there, yet he travelled with his son Scipio and Athenaeus, King Eumenes’s brother, leaving his army in the charge of Sulpicius Gallus.

He went through Thessaly to Delphi, then to Megaris, Aulis, Athens, Argos, Sparta, Megalopolis, and elsewhere. He took great satisfaction and immense delight in his journey—as who would not, on attempting the same? Even if a person travels “more for boasting than for the public good,” as one writer aptly observes—to brag, gaze about, see fine sights and customs, and pass the time rather than benefit himself or the public, as many fashionable young men do, travelling away their best years along with their means, manners, integrity, and religion—it is still of some use.

For travel charms our senses with such inexpressibly sweet variety that some think a person who has never travelled unfortunate, a kind of prisoner. They pity someone who, from cradle to old age, sees always the same things: always, always the same, the same. So much so that Rhazes, in his Continens, book 1, treatise 2, not only recommends travel and varied sights for a melancholy person but prescribes them, along with staying at different inns and being drawn into different company. Montalto, chapter 36, and many recent writers share this view.

Celsus therefore advises anyone wishing to preserve his health to have “a varied way of life”: different pursuits and occupations to keep him busy; sometimes living in the city, sometimes in the country; now concentrating on study or work, then hawking or hunting, swimming, running, riding, or taking other exercise. A good view alone will relieve melancholy, as Gomesius argues in On Salt, book 2, chapter 7.