The Anatomy of Melancholy

Or if a drunken man fathers a child, the child is unlikely ever to have a sound brain, as Gellius argues in book 12, chapter 1. “Drunkards beget drunkards”: one drunkard fathers another, says Plutarch, Table Talk, book 1, question 5. Lemnius endorses this judgement in book 1, chapter 4; so do Alsarius Crutius, Gen. de qui sit med., century 3, folio 182; Macrobius, book 1; Avicenna, book 3, fen 21, tract 1, chapter 8; and Aristotle himself, section 2, problem 4.

Foolish, drunken or flighty women generally bear children like themselves, “ill-tempered and feeble”; and the same applies to a man who sleeps with a menstruating woman.

Sexual intemperance is a principal cause—harmful and destructive—which Lemnius attacks especially in sailors who have intercourse with their wives without taking account of the menstrual flow or observing the time of the new moon. The Portuguese Roderigo de Castro therefore calls such intercourse deadly and pestilential; all physicians, without exception, condemn it.

Moreover, those conceived on the fourth day of the moon are generally unfortunate and mad, delirious, stupid, sickly, unclean, weak, tainted with a foul disease, scarcely capable of surviving, and deprived of every good quality of body and mind. If they live to grow older, says Eustathius, they are born to toil, like Hercules and others.

The Jews particularly attack this foul and unclean intercourse among Christians: they abhor it as unlawful and forbid it among themselves. They blame this unclean intercourse for Christians’ frequent leprosy and madness, their many sick people, skin eruptions, white patches, scabs, discolorations of skin and face, and so many widespread, painful and poisonous diseases. They call those men cruel to their offspring who do not recoil from such intercourse on the fourth day of the moon, while this menstrual filth is flowing.

The divine Law formerly condemned such men and punished them with death—Leviticus 18 and 20. If any children born from such intercourse were deformed or maimed, the father was stoned because he had not kept away from an unclean woman.

When Augustine asked Gregory the Great whether he should tolerate such intercourse among the Britons, Gregory strictly forbade women to have intercourse with their husbands during their customary monthly periods, and so on. I refrain from putting what I have said into English.

Some give another cause: an unregulated diet. If a man eats garlic or onions, fasts too much, studies too hard, is excessively sorrowful, dull, heavy, depressed in spirit, troubled in his thoughts, fearful, and so on, his children, says Cardan in On Subtlety, book 18, will be very prone to madness and melancholy.

For if the spirits of the brain are tainted or disordered by such means at the time of conception, their children’s brains will be tainted too: they will be dull, heavy, timid and discontented all their lives.