The Anatomy of Melancholy

Yet Wecker, drawing on Galen, calls it horse feed, more suitable for beasts of burden than for human beings. But read Galen himself, On Foods of Good and Bad Humours, book 1, for a fuller discussion of grain and bread.

All dark wines and excessively hot, compounded, strong, thick drinks—muscadine, malmsey, Alicante, rumney, brown bastard, metheglin and the like, of which they have thirty different kinds in Muscovy—all such prepared drinks are harmful in this case to those who are hot, of a sanguine-choleric temperament, young, or inclined to melancholy of the head.

For often wine drinking alone causes it. Arculanus, chapter 16 of his commentary on book 9 of Rhazes, counts wine among its chief causes, especially when drunk to excess. Guaineri, tract 15, chapter 2, tells of two Germans whom he entertained in his house: within a month both became melancholy from drinking wine; one did nothing but sing, the other sigh.

Galen, On the Causes of Diseases, chapter 3; Mattioli on Dioscorides; and above all Andrea Bacci, book 3, chapters 18, 19 and 20, have listed the harms that wine brings. Yet despite all this, for people with cold or sluggish melancholy a cup of wine is good medicine. Mercurialis concedes as much in consultation 25: in that case, if the temperament is cold, as it is in most melancholy people, wine is highly recommended if used in moderation.

Cider and perry are both cold drinks that cause wind, and should therefore be avoided, as should all those hot, spiced, strong drinks.

Beer, if too new or too old, too strong or insufficiently boiled, smelling of the cask, sharp or sour, is most unwholesome: it irritates and inflames, and so forth. Heinrich Ayrer, in a consultation for someone suffering from hypochondriacal melancholy, advises against beer. So does Crato in that excellent consultation of his, book 2, consultation 21, as producing too much wind because of the hops.

But he probably means that thick, dark Bohemian beer drunk in some other parts of Germany:

Nothing is thicker when it is drunk, Nothing clearer when it is pissed; from which It follows that it leaves much sediment in the body.

Nothing comes in so thick, Nothing goes out so thin; It follows, then, the dregs Must all be left within.

So that old poet mocked it, calling it “a monster resembling the Stygian marsh”—a monstrous drink, like the River Styx. But let them say what they please: for those accustomed to it, beer is a most wholesome drink, as Polydore Vergil calls it, and a pleasant one. It is finer and better for the hops that thin it, and has a special power against melancholy, as our herbalists acknowledge and Fuchs confirms in his Institutes, book 2, section 2, chapter 11, along with many others.

Stagnant waters, thick and discoloured, such as those from pools and moats where hemp has been soaked or slimy fish live, are most unwholesome: putrefied and full of mites and crawling creatures, slimy, muddy, unclean, corrupted and impure through the sun’s heat and their standing still. They cause foul imbalances in the human body and mind, and are unfit for making drink, preparing food or any internal or external use on people.

They serve many household uses, washing horses, watering cattle and so forth, or may be used in necessity, but not otherwise. Some think that such thick, stagnant waters make the best beer and that boiling clarifies it, as Cardan holds in On Subtlety, book 13: it improves its substance and flavour. But this runs against received opinion.