The Anatomy of Melancholy

What is no more than a flea bite to one person causes unbearable torment to another. What one can readily overcome through exceptional moderation and composure, another cannot endure at all. At the slightest occasion of supposed insult, injury, grief, disgrace, loss, setback, rumour and the like—especially if solitary or idle—he gives way so far to emotion that his bodily constitution changes, his digestion is impaired, his sleep disappears, his spirits grow clouded, his heart heavy, and the regions beneath his ribs become disordered. Wind and indigestion suddenly assail him, and melancholy overwhelms him.

It is like a man imprisoned for debt: once he is in jail, every creditor will bring a claim against him and probably keep him there. If any discontent takes hold of a sufferer, all other disturbances immediately attack him—for “they rush through the opening they are given.” Then, like a lame dog or a goose with a broken wing, he droops and wastes away, until he is brought into that unhealthy established condition, the disease of melancholy itself.

Thus, just as the philosophers distinguish eight degrees of heat and cold, we may distinguish eighty-eight of melancholy, according to the different ways the affected parts are seized by it, or have been plunged more or less deeply into this hellish gulf, or have waded further into it.

But all these melancholy fits—however pleasing at first, or displeasing, violent and tyrannical towards those they seize for a time—are called melancholy only in a loose sense, as are the people affected by them. They do not last, but come and go as particular things provoke them. The melancholy we shall examine is an established condition, a serious or chronic illness: a lasting disease, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, fixed rather than wandering. Just as it took a long time to develop, so now, whether pleasant or painful, having become established, it will be hard to remove.