The Anatomy of Melancholy

as children in the dark imagine hobgoblins and are terribly afraid—they remain the worse for it all their lives. Some are affected by sudden fires, earthquakes, floods or other dreadful sights. Themison the physician fell into hydrophobia through seeing someone ill with that disease (Dioscorides, book 6, chapter 33). Or the sight of a monster or a corpse disturbs them for many months afterwards: they cannot bear the room where a corpse has lain, would not be alone with a dead man for anything in the world, or sleep, even many years later, in a bed in which someone has died.

At Basel, a number of little children went in spring to gather flowers in a meadow at the edge of town, where an executed criminal hung on a gibbet. As they all stared at it, one happened to throw a stone and made it move. Frightened by this, the children ran away. One girl, slower than the others, looked back, saw the disturbed corpse swing towards her, and cried out that it was coming after her. She was so terribly frightened that for many days she could neither rest, eat nor sleep; she could not be comforted, and died in melancholy.

In the same town, across the Rhine, another child saw a grave opened. The sight of the corpse so disturbed her mind that she could not be comforted; she died shortly afterwards and was buried beside it. Plater, Observations, book 1.

A gentlewoman of the same city saw a fat pig cut open. When its entrails were exposed and an offensive smell reached her nose, she was disgusted and would stay no longer. A physician who was present told her that, like the pig, she too was full of filthy excrement, and made matters worse with other loathsome examples. This delicate gentlewoman took it so deeply to heart that she immediately began to vomit. Her mind and body were so badly disturbed that, for months afterwards, all his skill and persuasion could not restore her to herself. She could not forget it or get the sight out of her mind. The same author.

Many cannot bear to see a wound opened without distress, or to see a man executed, suffering from some dreadful disease, possessed, struck by apoplexy or bewitched. If they happen to read of something terrible, even just the symptoms of such a disease, or anything they find repellent, their minds are instantly troubled. They are aghast, ready to apply it to themselves, and as disturbed as if they had seen it or were themselves afflicted. “They seem to themselves to dream of Hecates”: they dream about it and think of it continually.

Equally lamentable effects come from dreadful things heard, read or seen. “Hearing produces the greatest movements in the body,” as Plutarch holds: no sense causes greater changes in body and mind. Sudden words or unexpected news, whether good or bad—“speech less foreseen”—can move us just as much, “overwhelm the mind and cast it out of its place,” as a philosopher observes. They deprive us of sleep and appetite, disturb us and quite overthrow us.

Let those bear witness who have heard the tragic alarms, outcries and hideous noises that so often break out suddenly in the dead of night, when enemies burst in, fires accidentally start, and so on. Such panics often drive people out of their minds, depriving them of their senses, understanding and everything: some for a time, others for the rest of their lives, never to recover.