The Anatomy of Melancholy

MEMBER 4 SUBSECTION 1 Symptoms or signs of love melancholy in body and mind Good and bad signs and so forth

The symptoms are either bodily or mental. Bodily symptoms include paleness, thinness, dryness and so on. “Every lover is pale; this colour suits a lover,” as the poet describes them; “love has caused wasting”: love makes people thin. Avicenna, in chapter 33, On Love, lists hollow eyes and dryness as symptoms of this disease, together with going about smiling to oneself or behaving as though one saw or heard something delightful.

Valleriola, in book 3, chapter 7 of his Observations; Laurentius, chapter 10; Eliano Montalto, On Love Melancholy; and Lange, in book 1, letter 24 of his Medical Letters, say much the same: “The bloodless body is pale; the body thin, the eyes hollow.” Thin and pale:

Like someone who has trodden on a snake with bare heels.

Hollow-eyed, their eyes sunken in their heads:

And the tender beauty of the radiant body has faded.

They waste away and look ill from sleeplessness, cares and sighs:

And the eyes that bore the marks of Phoebus’s torch No longer shine with their ancestral radiance.

With groans, grief, sadness and listlessness:

No thought now arises Of food or health.

Loss of appetite, and so on. Jason Pratensis explains all this: “Because the spirits are distracted, the liver fails to do its work and does not turn food into blood as it should. The limbs are consequently weak for lack of nourishment; they grow thin and wither, as the herbs in my garden do this May for lack of rain.” Thus young women often develop the green sickness, and men cachexia, or a poor bodily condition, besides their usual sighs, complaints and lamentations, which are all too frequent. Like drops from a still:

As liquid drips from a fire enclosed.

So Cupid’s fire draws tears from a true lover’s eyes.

Mighty Mars often cried out for Venus, Secretly wetting his fearsome cheek With womanish tears.

Fire is distilled into water; The abundant stream that bathes the face will bear witness.

Along with many other such sufferings. When Chariclea fell in love with Theagenes, as Heliodorus describes her, “she was half distracted, spoke without knowing what she said, sighed to herself, lay awake much of the time and suddenly grew thin.” And when the other woman became infatuated with her stepson, “an ugly pallor, languishing eyes,” and so forth: she had an ugly pallor, hollow eyes, restless thoughts and shortness of breath.

In a letter to his mistress Lucretia, Euryalus complains, among other grievances, “You have deprived me of both sleep and food”: you have taken away my appetite and my sleep. So the poet describes it accurately: