The Anatomy of Melancholy

There is another sorrow, arising from the loss of worldly goods and wealth, which afflicts us equally and may go hand in hand with the preceding one. Loss of time, honour, office, reputation or labour, and disappointed hopes, will torment us greatly; but in my judgement no torture equals this loss, or more quickly brings about this illness and calamity.

Lost money is mourned with genuine tears.

It wrings real tears from our eyes, many sighs and much sorrow from our hearts, and often causes settled melancholy itself. Guaineri, treatise 15, chapter 5, repeats this as a particular cause: “Loss of friends and loss of goods make many people melancholy, as I have often seen, through continually dwelling on such things.”

Arnald of Villanova stresses the same causes, Breviary, book 1, chapter 18: “from loss of possessions, damage, the death of friends,” and so on. Want alone will drive a man mad: being “without money” will cause deep and grievous melancholy.

Many people feel about this as Irishmen do, who, if they have a good scimitar, would rather take a blow on the arm than have their weapon damaged. They would sooner lose their lives than their possessions. The grief that follows lasts a long time, says Platter, and repeated dispositions produce an established condition.

Montanus and Frigimelica cured a young man of twenty-two who became melancholy in this way, “because of lost money”: a sum he had unfortunately lost. Schenck has another such story of a man made melancholy because he had overreached himself and spent his capital on unnecessary building.

Roger, that rich bishop of Salisbury, “stripped of wealth and castles by King Stephen”—deprived of his goods by King Stephen—“overwhelmed by the force of grief and driven mad, behaved disgracefully.” He went mad with grief, speaking and acting without knowing what he did.

Nothing is more common than for people in such circumstances to kill themselves through anguish of mind. A poor fellow went to hang himself, as Ausonius elegantly tells in a neat epigram; but happening to find a pot of money, he threw away the rope and went home cheerfully. The man who had hidden the gold, however, on finding it missing, hanged himself in despair with the rope the other man had left.

But the man who had hidden it, when he failed to find his gold, Fitted to his neck the noose that he did find.

Such deadly events can want and poverty produce. Whether through standing surety, shipwreck, fire, soldiers’ plunder and pillage, or any other loss, it makes no difference: it will produce the same effect, the same desolation in provinces and cities as in private individuals. The Romans were miserably cast down after the battle of Cannae, the men stunned with fear, the stupefied women tearing their hair and crying. So were the Hungarians when their King Ladislaus and their bravest soldiers were killed by the Turks: “public mourning,” and so on.