The Anatomy of Melancholy

Besides, I could hardly hold back, for “where the pain is, there goes the finger”: one must scratch where it itches. I was considerably afflicted by this malady—shall I call it my mistress Melancholy, my Egeria, or my “evil spirit”? And so, like someone stung by a scorpion, I would drive out “one nail with another,” soothe one sorrow with another, idleness with idleness, “as theriac is made from a viper,” making an antidote from the very thing that was the chief cause of my disease.

Or like the man Felix Platter describes, who thought he had some of Aristophanes' frogs in his belly, continually crying “Brecc’ ckex, coax, coax, oop, oop,” and for that reason studied medicine for seven years and travelled through most of Europe in search of relief. To help myself, I read through whatever medical authors our libraries could supply or my personal friends could share with me, and undertook all this labour.

And why not? Cardano says that he wrote his book On Consolation after his son's death to comfort himself. Cicero likewise wrote on the same subject, with the same purpose, after his daughter's death—if the work really is his, rather than an impostor's published under his name, as Lipsius suspects with good reason.

As for myself, perhaps I can say with Marius in Sallust: what others hear or read about, I have felt and practised myself. They gain their knowledge from books; I gain mine by melancholizing. “Trust Robert: he knows from experience.”

There are things I can speak of from experience: “painful experience has taught me.” And I can say with the woman in the poem: “Knowing misfortune myself, I am learning to help the unfortunate.” I would help others from fellow-feeling. Just as that virtuous lady of old, herself suffering from leprosy, devoted her whole inheritance to building a hospital for people with leprosy, I will spend my time and knowledge, my greatest possessions, for the good of everyone.

Yes, but you will say that this is “doing what has already been done,” an unnecessary task, “serving up twice-cooked cabbage”: the same thing again and again in different words. What is the point? Nothing worth saying has been left unsaid, as Lucian thought on a similar theme. How many excellent physicians have written full-length volumes and painstaking treatises on this subject? There is nothing new here. What I have is stolen from others: “My own page says to me, ‘You are a thief.’”

If Synesius's severe judgement is right—that it is a greater offence to steal dead men's writings than their clothes—what will become of most writers? I raise my hand at the bar alongside the others and plead guilty to this kind of felony: “You have a defendant who confesses.” I am content to be pressed with the rest.