The Anatomy of Melancholy

Every breeze terrifies him; every sound makes him start.

Another, through shyness, suspicion and timidity, will not be seen outside; he loves darkness as dearly as life and cannot endure the light or sit in well-lit places. With his hat always pulled down over his eyes, he would willingly neither see nor be seen: Hippocrates, On Madness and Melancholy.

He dares not enter company for fear of being mistreated or disgraced, making some mistake in his gestures or speech, or becoming ill. He thinks everyone watches him, singles him out, mocks him and bears him malice. For the most part they fear being bewitched, possessed or poisoned by their enemies, and sometimes suspect their closest friends. He thinks something speaks or talks inside him, or to him, and that he belches up the poison.

Christophorus à Vega, book 2, chapter 1, had a patient so troubled that no persuasion or medicine could bring him out of it. Some fear they will develop every dreadful disease they see in others, hear of or read about, and therefore dare not hear or read about any such subject, not even melancholy itself, lest by applying what they hear or read to themselves they should aggravate and increase it.

If they see someone possessed or bewitched, an epileptic seizure, a man shaking with palsy or dizzy, staggering or standing in a dangerous place, and so on, it runs through their minds for many days afterwards. They fear the same will happen to them, that they are in similar danger, as Perkins rightly observes in his Cases of Conscience, chapter 12, section 2; and often, through the force of imagination, they bring it about.

They cannot bear the sight of anything terrifying—a monster, a man being executed, a corpse—or to hear the Devil named, or encounter any tragic account, without quaking with fear. “They seem to themselves to dream of Hecates” (Lucian)—they dream of hobgoblins—and may be unable to put it out of their minds for a long time afterwards.

They apply everything they hear, see or read to themselves, as I have said. Felix Plater notes this of some young physicians who study to cure diseases, catch them themselves, become ill, and apply to their own persons every symptom they find described in others.

And therefore—“I give this warning again, though it may disgust the reader: I would rather have ten words too many, even repeated ten times, than one word missing”—I would advise anyone who is presently melancholic not to read this account of symptoms, lest he unsettle himself or become temporarily worse and more melancholic than before.

Take this as a general statement about them all: “They are always complaining and frightened over empty things,” says Aretius. They complain of trifles and fear without a cause, always thinking their own melancholy the most grievous, and no one so badly afflicted as they are. Though it may be nothing by comparison, surely no one was ever so troubled, or troubled in this particular way.