The Anatomy of Melancholy

SECTION 2 MEMBER 1 SUBSECTION 1 Causes of melancholy God as a cause

It is useless to speak of cures or think of remedies until we have considered the causes: this is Galen’s advice to Glaucon. The common experience of others confirms that treatments must be incomplete, deficient and ineffective when the causes have not first been investigated, as Prosper Calenius rightly observes in his treatise On Black Bile, addressed to Cardinal Cesi.

Indeed, Fernel makes knowledge of the causes a kind of necessity: without it, no disease can be cured or prevented. Empirical practitioners may relieve a disease, and sometimes give help, but cannot root it out completely. As the saying goes, “Remove the cause and the effect disappears”: once the cause is removed, the effect is overcome as well.

I admit that it is extremely difficult to distinguish these causes and their origins, and, amid such variety, to say where the disease began. Happy is the person who can do this correctly. I shall venture to come as close as I can, laying them all open, from first to last, general and particular, for every kind of the disease, so that they may be more clearly understood.

General causes are either supernatural or natural. Supernatural causes come from God and his angels, or, with God’s permission, from the devil and his servants. Many examples and testimonies in Holy Scripture make it clear to us that God himself causes disease to punish sin and satisfy his justice: Psalm 107:17, “Foolish people are afflicted for their offences and because of their wickedness.”

Gehazi was struck with leprosy, 2 Kings 5:27; Jehoram with dysentery, diarrhoea and severe bowel disease, 2 Chronicles 21:15; David with a plague for taking a census of his people, 1 Chronicles 21. Sodom and Gomorrah were swallowed up. And this particular disease is expressly mentioned in Psalm 107:12: “He brought their hearts low through distress”; and in Deuteronomy 28:28: “He struck them with madness, blindness and bewilderment of heart.”

An evil spirit was sent upon Saul by the Lord to torment him. Nebuchadnezzar ate grass like an ox, and his mind became like that of the beasts of the field. Pagan stories are full of such punishments. Bacchus drove Lycurgus mad because he cut down the vines in the country; Pentheus and his mother Agave were likewise driven mad for neglecting their sacrifice.

The censor Fulvius went mad after taking the roof tiles from Juno’s temple to cover a new temple of his own, dedicated to Fortune; grief and anguish overwhelmed him and brought him to his death. When Xerxes tried to plunder Apollo’s temple at Delphi of its immense riches, terrible thunder came from heaven and struck four thousand men dead; the rest went mad. A little later, Brennus met with lightning, thunder and earthquakes on a similarly sacrilegious undertaking.