The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 3. Classification of diseases of the head.

These diseases of the mind, because their chief seat and organs are in the head, are commonly listed among diseases of the head, which are various and differ greatly according to their location. Just as the head has several parts, so it has various ailments. According to Heurnius’s classification, taken from Arculanus, these are internal or external—leaving aside all those affecting the eyes and ears, nostrils, gums, teeth, mouth, palate, tongue, windpipe, jaws, face and so on. Those belonging specifically to the brain include baldness, loss of hair, dandruff, lice and the like.

Internal diseases affect the membranes next to the brain, called the dura mater and pia mater, as do headaches and the like; or its ventricles, coverings, membranes, recesses and other parts, with their disorders, such as profound stupor, vertigo, nightmare oppression, apoplexy and the falling sickness. Diseases of the nerves include cramps, numbness, convulsions, tremor and paralysis. Others concern the brain’s waste matter: catarrhs, sneezing, rheums and dripping discharges. Still others affect the substance of the brain itself, where frenzy, lethargy, melancholy, madness, weak memory, sopor, coma vigilia and vigil coma are thought to arise.

From these I shall select those that specifically affect fantasy or imagination, or reason itself. Laurentius calls them diseases of the mind, and Hildesheim “diseases of impaired imagination or reason.” There are three or four: frenzy, madness, melancholy and mental impairment, with their varieties, such as hydrophobia, lycanthropy, St Vitus’s dance and demonic disorders. I shall touch briefly on these, concentrating on melancholy as the most prominent of them, and following all its kinds, causes, symptoms, prognoses and cures, as Lonicerus has done with apoplexy and many others with particular diseases.

I do not mean to find fault with earlier writers on this subject, such as Jason Pratensis, Laurentius, Montaltus, Timothy Bright and others. They have done very well in their different forms and methods. Yet what one omits another may happen to notice, and what one compresses another may expand. To conclude with Scribanius: what they neglected or treated superficially, we may examine more thoroughly; what they expressed obscurely, we may set out and develop clearly. In this way it may become more familiar and easier for everyone to understand, and serve the common good, which is the chief aim of my discourse.