The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 15 Love of learning or excessive study With a digression on the misery of scholars and why the Muses are melancholy

Leonhart Fuchs, Institutes, book 3, section 1, chapter 1; Felix Plater, book 3, On Mental Derangement; and Hercules of Saxony, the later treatise On Melancholy, chapter 3, speak of a particular frenzy caused by excessive study. Fernel, book 1, chapter 18, names study, contemplation and continual meditation as a special cause of madness, and repeats the same words in his eighty-sixth consultation. Giovanni Arcolano, commenting on book 9, chapter 16, of Rhazes’ To Almansor, lists “intense study” among the causes.

So does Levinus Lemnius, On the Hidden Wonders of Nature, book 1, chapter 16. “Many men,” he says, “come to this illness through continual study and staying awake at night; of all men, scholars are most subject to it”—especially, Rhazes adds, those who generally have the keenest minds, in Continens, book 1, treatise 9. Marsilio Ficino, On Preserving Health, book 1, chapter 7, places melancholy among the five principal afflictions of students. It is a common scourge to them all and, to some degree, almost an inseparable companion.

Perhaps for that reason Varro calls them “sad and stern philosophers.” Stern, sad, dry and sour are common descriptions of scholars. Patritius therefore, in his instruction of princes, would not have them become great students. For, as Machiavelli holds, study weakens their bodies, dulls their spirits and reduces their strength and courage; good scholars are never good soldiers. A certain Goth understood this well. When his countrymen entered Greece and wanted to burn all the books, he protested that they should by no means do it: leave the Greeks that plague, which in time would consume all their vigour and martial spirit.

The Turks excluded Cornutus, the next heir, from the empire because he was so devoted to his books. The common opinion of the world is that learning dulls and diminishes the spirits and consequently produces melancholy.

Two main reasons can be given for students’ greater susceptibility to this illness. One is that they lead a sedentary, solitary life, “for themselves and the Muses,” without bodily exercise or the ordinary recreations other men enjoy. Often, if discontent and idleness join in—which happens all too frequently—they are suddenly plunged into this gulf. But the common cause is excessive study: “Too much learning has made you mad,” as Festus told Paul. It is that other extreme which brings it about.

Trincavelli found this in his own experience, in book 1, consultations 12 and 13: two of his patients, a young baron and another man, contracted the illness through excessively intense study. So did Forestus, Observations, book 10, observation 13, in the case of a young theologian at Louvain who was mad and said he had a Bible in his head. Marsilio Ficino, On Preserving Health, book 1, chapters 1, 3 and 4, and book 2, chapter 16, gives several reasons why students lose their senses more often than other people.