The Anatomy of Melancholy

While staying in the country during the vacation some years ago, at my father’s house in Lindley in Leicestershire, I first observed this amulet—a spider in a nutshell wrapped in silk, and so on—used in this way against an ague by my mother. I knew that she had excellent skill in surgery, treating sore eyes, aches and the like, and in such remedies learned from experience; all the countryside where she lived can testify that she performed many notable and successful cures on poor people who otherwise had no help.

Yet of all her remedies, this seemed to me the most absurd and ridiculous; I could see no justification for it. “What has a spider to do with a fever?” What antipathy could there be? At last, wandering among authors, as I often do, I found this very remedy in Dioscorides, approved by Mattioli and repeated by Aldrovandi in the chapter on the spider in his book On Insects. I began to think better of it and to give more credit to amulets when I saw it prove effective in some people’s experience.

Medicines consisting of words, signs, spells and charms must be rejected: they can do no good at all except through a powerful conviction, as Pomponazzi proves, or through the Devil’s contrivance, since he is their original inventor and teacher.