The Anatomy of Melancholy

Luis Mercado, a Spanish physician, in the excellent treatise he has recently written on hereditary diseases, Works, volume 2, book 5, lists leprosy—as among those Gaibots in Gascony, hereditary lepers—pox, stone, gout, epilepsy, and so forth. Among the rest, melancholy and madness come upon many people after a certain time—something he calls a marvel of nature—and remain with them for ever as an incurable condition.

More astonishing still, in some families it skips the father and passes to the son, or affects every second and sometimes every third generation in the direct line of descent. It does not always produce the same disease, but a similar or corresponding one. These secondary causes, derived in this way, are commonly so powerful that, as Wolphius holds, “they often change the decrees of the stars”: they often alter the primary causes and the decrees of heaven.

Presumably for these reasons, Church and state, human and divine law, have united to prevent hereditary diseases by forbidding marriages between people related in any degree. Mercado advises every family to choose partners, “if possible, whose natures differ most”: to select those whose constitutions differ most from their own, if they love their families and care about the common good.

Indeed, I think God’s special providence has ordained that in every age there should be—as there usually is—once in six hundred years, a migration of nations to improve and purify their blood, just as we change the seed sown on our land. Hence the flood, as it were, of those northern Goths and Vandals, and many similar peoples who came from the lands of Scandinavia and Sarmatia, as some suppose, and swept like a deluge over most of Europe and Africa,

to change for the better our constitutions, badly damaged by the hereditary infirmities we had contracted through lust and intemperance. A healthy race of strong, able men was sent among us, such as those northern men generally are: harmless, free from excess and free from disease, to temper us and make us like those poor naked Indians generally are today;

and like the people around Brazil, as a recent writer observes, on the island of Maranhão: free from all hereditary diseases and other contagion, commonly living for a hundred and twenty years or more without medicine, as in the Orkneys and many other places. Such are the usual effects of temperance and intemperance. But I will turn to particulars and show by what means, and especially through whom, this infirmity is passed down to us.

“Children born to old men seldom have a sound constitution.” Old men’s children seldom have a good temperament, as Scoltzius supposes in consultation 177, and are therefore particularly prone to this disease. As Levinus Lemnius further adds, old men generally father wayward, irritable, sad, melancholy sons, and seldom cheerful ones.

A man who fathers a child on a full stomach will have either a sick child or a mentally impaired son, as Cardan thinks in Medical Contradictions, book 1, contradiction 18. The same applies if the parents are ill or have a severe pain in the head, a migraine or headache; Hieronymus Wolf gives the example of a child of Sebastian Castellio.