The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 3 Symptoms of melancholy abounding throughout the body

The bodies of those affected by this universal melancholy are generally dark in complexion. The melancholic fluid is excessive throughout; they are hairy and lean, with broad veins and dense, thick blood. Their spleen is weak and their liver prone to generate the humour. They have followed a bad diet, or some bodily discharge has been stopped, such as haemorrhoidal bleeding or women’s menstruation. Trallianus would have this carefully investigated in treatment, together with the person’s complexion, whether dark or red.

For, as Forrestus and Hollerius maintain, if they are dark, it proceeds from an abundance of natural black bile. If it proceeds from cares, agony, discontents, diet, exercise and the like, they may just as well be any other colour—red, yellow or pale—as dark, and yet all their blood may be corrupted. “Such people are often very red in colour, often yellow,” says Montaltus, chapter 22. The best way to distinguish this type is to let them bleed: if the blood is corrupted, thick and black, and they are also free of those hypochondriacal symptoms, or less severely troubled by them or those of the head, it indicates melancholy “arising from the whole body.”

The fumes rising from this corrupted blood disturb the mind and make them fearful and sorrowful, heavy-hearted like the rest, dejected, discontented, solitary, silent, weary of life, dull and heavy—or merry, and so on. If far gone, what Apuleius wished upon his enemy as a curse becomes true of them: dead men’s bones, hobgoblins and ghosts are always in their minds and meet them at every turn; all the night’s bogeys and terrors, the fairy creatures of tombs and graves, are before their eyes and in their thoughts, as with women and children alone in the dark.

If they hear, read or see anything tragic, it stays with them. They are afraid of death, yet weary of life. In their discontented moods they quarrel with the whole world, rail bitterly and criticize satirically; and because they cannot otherwise vent their passions or put right what they think is wrong, they will in the end take revenge upon themselves by a violent death.