The Anatomy of Melancholy

The symptoms of the mind are excessive and continual thoughts; for when the head is heated it scorches the blood, and melancholic fumes arise from it and trouble the mind: Avicenna. They are very irritable and quickly angered, solitary, sad, often silent, sleepless and discontented: Montaltus, chapter 24. If anything troubles them, they cannot sleep but keep fretting until something else eases the distress or time wears it away.

They have grievous passions and excessive disturbances of mind—fear, sorrow and the like—yet these are not so continuous that they are never cheerful. Sometimes they are prone to unrestrained laughter, which is all the more surprising; and this is explained, on Galen’s own authority, by an admixture of blood. “The very ruddy delight in jokes and are generally mockers”: if ruddy, they enjoy jests and are often witty scoffers themselves; and, as Rhodericus à Vega comments on that passage of Galen, they are merry, witty and pleasant in disposition, yet deeply melancholic soon afterwards. “They learn everything without a teacher,” says Aretaeus: they learn without a teacher.

And, as Laurentius supposes, those dreadful passions and symptoms in people who think themselves glass, pitchers, feathers, and so on, or speak unfamiliar languages, proceed “from the heat of the brain,” if excessive—from its disordered heat.