The Anatomy of Melancholy

Aelianus Montalto attributes so much importance to these emotions that he considers their correction alone enough to cure melancholy in most patients. Many are fully cured when they have seen or heard something, and so forth, attained what they desire, or been reassured and satisfied in their minds. Galen, the common master of them all, from whose fountain they draw their water, boasts in book 1 of On the Preservation of Health that he himself has cured several people of this illness “solely by putting their minds on the right course”—by rightly settling their minds alone.

Yes, but you will object here that this would indeed be excellent if it could be done. But how is it to be achieved, by whom, through what skill, by what means? “Here is the labour, here the task.” This is a natural infirmity, a most powerful adversary. Everyone is subject to passions, and melancholy people above all others, disordered as they are by their inborn humours, an excess of burnt bile, weakness of the organs, and external events. How are such passions to be avoided?

The wisest men, the greatest philosophers, with outstanding intelligence, reason, and judgement—divine spirits—cannot control themselves in this respect. People sound in body and mind, Stoics, heroes, Homer’s gods: all are subject to passions and sometimes swept furiously away. How, then, can we resist, already impaired as we are, “broken in spirit,” sick in body and sick in mind? We cannot do it. You may offer advice and sound precepts—who cannot? But how are they to be put into practice?

I cannot deny that our passions are violent and tyrannize over us. Yet there are ways to curb them. Though headstrong, they may be tamed and moderated if the sufferer himself or his friends will make an earnest effort, or use the ordinary kinds of help commonly prescribed.

He himself, I say: the first and principal remedy must come from the patient. If he is unwilling, obstinate, irritable, yields wholly to his passions, refuses to seek help or to be guided by his friends, how can he possibly be cured? But if at last he is willing, gentle, receptive, and desires his own good, then undoubtedly he may “lay aside a great part of the illness”—at least find relief, if not a cure.

He must make every effort to resist and withstand the beginnings. “Resist at the outset.” “Give water no passage, not even a little,” Ecclesiasticus 25:27. If a small opening is allowed, in time it will become a larger breach.

Whatever runs through his mind—some empty fancy, pleasing or displeasing, that so deeply affects or troubles him—he must resist it by every possible means. He must drive out those empty, false, frivolous imaginings, absurd notions, and imagined fears and sorrows from which, says Piso, this disease chiefly proceeds and takes its first occasion or beginning: by doing something contrary to them, thinking of something else, reasoning with himself, or in any way bringing about a sudden change in them.