The Anatomy of Melancholy

At Braga in Portugal, Burgos in Castile and Messina in Sicily, and throughout Spain and Italy, streets are mostly narrow to keep out the sun’s rays. The Turks wear large turbans “to ward off the sun’s rays”—to deflect the sunlight. The hot air of Bantam in Java causes our men staying there to trade great discomfort. It is so hot that people suffering from the pox commonly lie bleaching in the sun to dry their sores.

I read a similar complaint about the Cape Verde islands, fourteen degrees from the equator: “they have a bad reputation.” One writer calls them the world’s unhealthiest climate because of the diarrhoea, fevers, frenzies and burning fevers that commonly attack sailors who call there, all attributed to the air’s excessive heat. This heat harms even the hardiest men, and the toughest labourers cannot withstand it, as Constantine affirms, Agriculture, book 2, chapter 45.

Even those born in such a climate may be unable to bear it, as Niger records of a part of Mesopotamia now called Diarbecha: “In some places it is so exposed to raging heat that most living creatures are killed by the burning sun and sky.” It is so hot in some places that local people and cattle die of it. Adricomius says of Arabia Felix that, because of the myrrh, frankincense and hot spices growing there, the air is so harmful to the brain that at times even the inhabitants cannot endure it, much less the weak and strangers.

Amatus Lusitanus, first hundred case histories, case 45, tells of a girl of about thirteen, the daughter of a leather dresser named Vincent, who would wash her hair in the heat of the day in July, then let it dry in the sun to turn it golden. But by staying in the heat too long she inflamed her head and drove herself mad.

At the other extreme, cold air is almost as bad as hot, and Montaltus judges it so in chapter 11, if it is dry as well. In those northern countries the people are therefore generally dull and sluggish, and many are witches—a condition that Saxo Grammaticus, Olaus and Giambattista della Porta attribute to melancholy, as I have already quoted. But these cold climates are more subject to natural melancholy, which is cold and dry, than to this artificial kind. That is presumably why Mercurius Britannicus places melancholy people immediately beneath the Pole.

The worst of the three is thick, cloudy, misty, foggy air, or air that comes from fens, marshy ground, lakes, dunghills, privies and drains, wherever carcasses or carrion lie, or from any source of a foul, disgusting smell. Galen, Avicenna and Mercurialis, physicians ancient and modern, hold that such air is unhealthy and breeds melancholy, plagues and what not?

Alexandretta, a port on the Mediterranean, and San Juan de Ulúa, a harbour in New Spain, are much condemned for their bad air, as are Durrës in Albania, Lithuania, Dithmarschen, the Pontine Marshes in Italy, the areas around Pisa and Ferrara, and so on; and here, Romney Marsh, the Essex Hundreds and the Lincolnshire Fens.