The Anatomy of Melancholy

They are changeable beyond all measure: sometimes laughing immoderately, extraordinarily merry, then weeping without a cause—which is common among many gentlewomen—groaning, sighing, pensive, sad, almost beside themselves. “They imagine many absurd things, foreign to reason,” says Frambesarius: they invent many absurdities, vain and unreasonable. One supposes himself a dog, cock, bear, horse, glass, butter, and so on. He is a giant, a dwarf, as strong as a hundred men, a lord, duke, prince, and so on.

And if he is told that his breath stinks, that he has a large nose, that he is sick or prone to this or that disease, he believes it at once, and perhaps by the force of imagination will bring it about. Many are immovable and fixed in their ideas; others change with every object they hear or see. If they see a stage play, they dwell on it for a week afterwards; if they hear music or see dancing, they have nothing but bagpipes in their brains; if they see a fight, they are all for arms.

If insulted, the insult troubles them long afterwards; if thwarted, the disappointment, and so on. Restless in thought and action, continually brooding, “like a sick person’s dreams, unreal forms are fashioned.” More like dreamers than waking people, they invent a host of grotesque, fantastic ideas; their thoughts are utterly frivolous, impossible to put into effect. Sometimes they firmly believe that they hear and see before their eyes the very phantoms or goblins they fear, suspect or imagine; they continually talk with them and follow them.

In short, “their thoughts are like those of dreamers; absorbed in thought, they experience awake what others dream.” Always, says Avicenna, they are awake as others dream, and such for the most part are their imaginings and ideas: absurd, empty, foolish trifles. Yet they are exceedingly absorbed and anxious, continually and “beyond measure,” Rhazes, Continens, book 1, chapter 9: “they ponder some matter beforehand.” As serious over a trifle as though it were essential business of great weight and importance, and still, still, still thinking about it: “they rage against themselves,” wearing themselves away.

Although they talk with you and seem otherwise occupied, and to your mind deeply intent and busy, still that trifle runs in their minds: that fear, that suspicion, that insult, that jealousy, that agony, that vexation, that disappointment, that castle in the air, that crotchet, that whim, that fiction, that pleasant waking dream, whatever it may be. “They neither ask questions,” says Fracastorius, “nor answer questions properly.”

They pay little attention to what you say; their minds are on something else. Ask what you will, they do not listen or give much attention to the business before them, but forget what they are saying, doing, or should be saying or doing, and where they are going, distracted by their own melancholic thoughts. One suddenly laughs, another smiles to himself, a third frowns, calls out, keeps moving his lips, gestures with his hand as he walks, and so on.