The Anatomy of Melancholy

SUBSECTION 3 Compound purgatives

Compound medicines that purge melancholy are taken through either the upper or the lower parts of the body: through the upper parts at the mouth or nostrils. At the mouth they are either swallowed or not swallowed; those swallowed are liquid or solid. Liquids include compound wines of hellebore, squill or sea onion, and senna; squill wine and hellebore wine, which Quercetan praises so highly “for melancholy and madness, either taken internally or applied externally to the head with small pieces of linen dipped into it while warm.”

Other examples are squill oxymel and Quercetan’s greater and lesser hellebore syrups; the same author’s broom syrup for hypochondriacal melancholy; compound syrups of chicory, fumitory, polypody and so on; and Heurnius’ purgative rooster broth.

Some object to these syrups as extremely harmful, as appears in Udalrinus Leonorus’ letter to Mattioli. They appeal to Hippocrates: “Move and treat what is concocted, not what is crude”—no raw things should be used in medicine. But Mattioli rejects and thoroughly refutes this in the following letter. Many juleps, potions and recipes are compounded from these substances, as you will find in Hildesheim’s Gleanings, book 2; Heurnius, book 2, chapter 14; George Skenkius’ Practice of Italian Medicine and elsewhere.

Solid purgatives are confections, electuaries and pills, taken alone or compounded with other ingredients: preparations of lapis lazuli or Armenian stone, Indian pills, fumitory pills and so on. There is Hamech’s confection, which most approve, although Solenander attacks it bitterly in section 5, consultation 22, as do Rondelet in his Apothecary’s Workshop, Fernel and others. There are Diasena, Diapolypodium, Diacasia, Diacatholicon, Wecker’s electuary of epithyme and Ptolemy’s Hierologadium, from which various recipes are made daily.

Aetius, 22, 33, recommends Rufus’ Hiera. Trincavelli, book 1, consultation 12, approves of Hiera: “I find no better medicine,” he says; he says he finds no better medicine. Heurnius adds aggregate pills, epithyme pills and Indian pills. Mesue describes, in the Florentine Antidotary, “pills I would not be without,” Cochia pills with hellebore, Arabian pills, fetid pills and pills of the five kinds of myrobalans. These are more specifically suited to melancholy, without meanwhile excluding turbith, manna, rhubarb, agaric, Elescophe and others less specifically suited to this humour.

For, as Montaltus maintains in chapter 30, and Montanus also, “choler too must be purged, because it feeds black bile”: choler must be purged because it nourishes the other humour. Some hold the opinion maintained long ago by Erasistratus and Asclepiades, against whom Galen argues, “that no medicine purges only one humour, but all alike, or whichever is nearest.” Most therefore combine several single substances and compounds in the recipes and special preparations devised here, to purge all the humours generally as well as this one.