The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 5 Bad air as a cause of melancholy

Air is a very important cause of this or any other disease, since through breathing it is continually drawn into our bodies and their innermost parts. If impure and foggy, it depresses the spirits and causes disease by infecting the heart, as Paulus says, book 1, chapter 49; so do Avicenna, book 1; Galen, On Preserving Health; Mercurialis; Montalto and others.

Fernel says that thick air thickens the blood and humours. Lemnius identifies two principal things capable of doing our bodies the greatest good and the greatest harm: air and diet. Nothing, Joubert holds, more readily causes this particular disease than the air in which we breathe and live. As the air is, so are our spirits; as our spirits are, so are our humours. Air commonly harms us if it is too hot and dry, thick, sooty, cloudy, blustering or stormy.

Bodin, in his Republic, book 5, chapter 1, and in chapter 5 of his Method of History, demonstrates that hot countries suffer most from melancholy. Consequently, Spain, Africa and Asia Minor have great numbers of mad people, so many that every important city is obliged to build special hospitals for them. Leo Africanus, book 3 on the city of Fez, Ortelius and Zwinger confirm as much. They are generally so irritable in their speech that scarcely two words of ordinary conversation pass without abuse or scolding, and they frequently quarrel in the streets.

Bernard of Gordon wants everyone to take notice: “Observe,” he says, “that it is much more common in hot countries than in cold.” Yet what we have just said is not always so, for, as Acosta truly says, even beneath the equator itself there are places with a most temperate climate and wholesome air, a paradise of delight: leaves always green, cooling showers.

But it does hold for places of excessive heat, as Johannes a Meggen found in Cyprus, and others in Malta, Apulia and the Holy Land. At certain seasons there is nothing but dust: the rivers dried up, the air scorching, the earth ablaze. Many pilgrims walking barefoot out of devotion over the hot sands from Joppa to Jerusalem often go mad, or are completely overwhelmed by sand, “in deep sands,” as happens in many parts of Africa, Arabia Deserta and Bactriana, now Charassan: when the west wind blows, “travellers are engulfed in sand and killed.”

Hercules de Saxonia, a professor in Venice, gives this reason for so many Venetian women being melancholy: “because they spend a long time in the sun”—they remain in the sun too long. Montanus, consultation 21, gives this among the reasons why his Jewish patient was mad: “because he exposed himself so much to heat and cold”—he exposed himself so much to heat and cold.

For that reason there is little movement in Venice’s brick-paved streets around noon in summer: most people are then asleep, as they are in the Great Mughal’s territories and throughout the East Indies. At Aden in Arabia, as Ludovico di Varthema relates in his travels, markets are held at night to avoid the extreme heat. In Hormuz, people of every sort lie in water up to their chins all day, like cattle in a pasture.