The Anatomy of Melancholy

Magninus agrees with Crato: “They disturb the mind, sending thick fumes to the brain, and make people mad”—especially garlic and onions, if someone eats them freely for a whole year. Guaineri, tract 15, chapter 2, complains of every kind of root; so does Bruyérin, even of parsnips themselves, which are the best, in book 9, chapter 14: “Eating parsnips produces bad humours.”

Crato, consultation 21, book 1, absolutely forbids all kinds of fruit: pears, apples, plums, cherries, strawberries, nuts, medlars, service berries and so forth. “They taint the blood,” says Villanovanus; they corrupt the blood and putrefy it, Magninus holds, and must therefore not be taken “as food, or in great quantity”—not made into a meal or eaten in any large amount.

Cardan makes this a cause of the continual sickness at Fez in Africa: people live so largely on fruit, eating it three times a day. In his Treatise on Melancholy, Laurentius approves many fruits that others reject, including apples, which some likewise recommend—sweetings, pearmains and pippins—as good against melancholy.

But for anyone at all inclined to or affected by this illness, Nicholas Piso, in his Practice of Medicine, forbids all fruit as wind-producing, or at least directs that it be eaten sparingly and never raw. Among other fruits, Bruyérin, following Galen, makes an exception for grapes and figs, but I find these rejected too.

All pulses are bad: beans, peas, vetches and so forth. They fill the brain, says Isaac, with thick fumes, produce black, thick blood and cause disturbing dreams. Thus what Pythagoras told his pupils long ago may always be applied to melancholy people: “Abstain from beans”—eat no peas or beans.

Yet to those determined to eat them I would give this advice: prepare them according to the rules that Arnaldus Villanovanus and Frietagius prescribe for eating and preparing fruit, herbs, roots, pulses and the like.

Spices cause hot melancholy and melancholy of the head, and for that reason our physicians forbid them to people inclined to this illness: pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, mace, dates and so forth; honey and sugar too. Some make an exception for honey, which may be tolerable for those of a cold constitution; but “sweet things turn into bile”—they cause obstructions.

Crato therefore forbids all spices in a consultation for a melancholy schoolmaster: “All aromatics and whatever scorches the blood.” So do Fernel, consultation 45; Guaineri, tract 15, chapter 2; and Mercurialis, consultation 189. To these I may add everything sharp and sour, luscious and excessively sweet, or fatty: oil, vinegar, verjuice, mustard and salt. Just as sweet things cause obstructions, these are corrosive.

Gomesius, in On Salt, book 1, chapter 21, highly recommends salt; so does Codronchus in his treatise On Salt of Wormwood, and Lemnius in On the Hidden Wonders of Nature, book 3, chapter 9. Yet common experience finds salt and salted foods great causes of this disease. Perhaps this was why those Egyptian priests abstained from salt, even in their bread: “so that the soul might be undisturbed,” says my author—so that their souls might be free from disturbances.

Bread made from inferior grain, such as peas, beans, oats or rye, or baked too hard, crusty and black, is often condemned for producing melancholic humours and wind. John Mair, in the first book of his History of Scotland, argues vigorously for the wholesomeness of oat bread:

While he was living in Paris, France, people reproached him with his countrymen’s eating oats and inferior grain, as though it were a disgrace. But he frankly acknowledges that Scotland, Wales and a third of England chiefly used that kind of bread, and maintains that it was as wholesome as any grain and provided just as good nourishment.