The Anatomy of Melancholy

If meanwhile any physician objects, “Let the cobbler stick to his shoes,” and resents my intrusion into his profession, I will answer briefly: I treat them no differently from the way they treat us. When it benefits them, many of their fraternity, as I know, take holy orders in the hope of obtaining a church living. It is a common change of profession. So why may a melancholy clergyman, who can obtain nothing except by buying a church appointment, not practise medicine?

The Italian Drusianus—whom Trithemius mistakenly calls Crusianus—abandoned his profession because his medical practice was unsuccessful, and afterwards wrote on theology. Marsilio Ficino was “at one and the same time” a priest and a physician, and Thomas Linacre took holy orders in old age. The Jesuits practise both professions today; several of them, “with their superiors’ permission,” are surgeons, pimps, procurers, and midwives, and so on.

Many poor country vicars, lacking other means of support, are forced to fend for themselves by becoming mountebanks, quacks, and empirical healers. And if our greedy patrons keep us on such harsh terms, as they commonly do, they will force most of us to work at a trade, as Paul did—eventually to become hired labourers, maltsters, fruit sellers, cattle rearers, or ale sellers, as some already have, or worse.

However that may be, I hope that, all things properly considered, undertaking this task involves no great error or impropriety. I can defend myself by the example of those two learned clergymen, Georg Braun and Hieronymus Henning. To borrow a line or two from my elder brother: drawn by a natural love of pictures and maps, perspective views, and the delights of describing places, the first wrote that extensive Theatre of Cities; drawn to the study of genealogies, the other composed the Genealogical Theatre. Or I can justify my studies as the Jesuit Lessius did in a similar case: I am treating a disease of the soul, which concerns a clergyman as much as a physician;

and who does not know how closely these professions agree? A good clergyman either is or ought to be a good physician—a spiritual physician, at least—as our Saviour calls himself, and indeed was: Matthew 4:23, Luke 5:18, Luke 7:8. The professions differ only in their object: one treats the body, the other the soul, and they use different medicines to cure. One heals “the soul through the body,” the other “the body through the soul,” as our Regius Professor of Medicine explained well in a learned lecture not long ago. One remedies the soul’s vices and passions—anger, lust, despair, pride, presumption, and so on—by applying spiritual medicine, while the other uses appropriate remedies for bodily diseases.

Now melancholy is an infirmity shared by body and soul, needing spiritual treatment as much as bodily treatment. I could find no more fitting occupation, no more appropriate theme—so necessary, so useful, and of such general concern to every kind of person—that belongs so equally to both professions and requires a complete physician. In this complex, mixed illness, a clergyman alone can do little; in some kinds of melancholy a physician can do much less. Together they make a complete cure. Thus each needs the other’s help.