The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 6 Excessive exercise as a cause, and how it acts. Solitude and idleness.

Nothing is so good that it cannot be misused. Nothing is better than exercise, taken at the right time, for preserving the body; nothing worse when it is ill-timed, violent or excessive. Fernel, citing Galen in his Pathology, book 1, chapter 16, says that excessive exercise and exhaustion consume the spirits and bodily substance and chill the body. They stir up and inflame humours that nature would otherwise have processed and expelled; once inflamed, these affect and disturb body and mind in various ways.

The same happens when exercise is taken at the wrong time, on a full stomach or when the body is full of undigested matter. Fuchs strongly attacks this in Institutes, book 2, section 2, chapter 4, explaining that German schoolboys so often have scabby skin because they exercise immediately after meals. Bayerus warns against such exercise because it spoils the food in the stomach and carries its juice, still raw and undigested, into the veins, says Lemnius, where it putrefies and disrupts the animal spirits.

Crato, consultation 21, book 2, protests against all such exercise after meals as the greatest possible enemy of digestion and a cause of corrupted humours, which produce this and many other diseases. Not without good reason, then, do Sallustius Salvianus, book 2, chapter 1; Leonartus Jacchinus, on book 9 of Rhazes; Mercurialis; Arculanus; and many others list excessive exercise as a most powerful cause of melancholy.

The opposite of exercise is idleness—the badge of gentility—or lack of exercise: the ruin of body and mind, the nurse of wickedness, the stepmother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, and a cause sufficient by itself to produce this and many other illnesses. It is the devil’s cushion, as Gualter calls it, his pillow and favourite resting place. For the mind can never rest: it is always thinking about something, and unless occupied with some worthwhile business, it rushes of its own accord into melancholy.

Just as excessive and violent exercise does harm at one extreme, says Crato, an idle life does so at the other: it fills the body with phlegm, thick humours, all kinds of blockages, rheums, catarrhs and so on. Rhazes, Continens, book 1, treatise 9, counts it the greatest cause of melancholy. “I have often seen,” he says, “that idleness breeds this humour more than anything else.” Montaltus, chapter 1, supports him from his own experience: idle people are far more prone to melancholy than those engaged in some duty or business.