The Anatomy of Melancholy

Therefore, encouraging promises, kind words, and gentle persuasion must be used by every means. Do not be too severe at first, or browbeat them, mock them, neglect them, or treat them with contempt; instead, as Lemnius urges, pity them and try by every agreeable means to bring them back to health.

But if reassurance cannot be achieved, and mild methods, promises, comforting words, and good counsel have no effect, then, as Cristóbal de Vega determines in book 3, chapter 14, on melancholy, treat them more roughly. Threaten and scold them, says Altomari; sometimes frighten them. Or, as Salviani would have it, lash and whip them, as we do a shying horse frightened without a cause. Or follow Rhazes’ advice: at one time speak gently and flatter them, at another frighten and scold them, as circumstances seem to require.

When none of these preceding remedies works, it will be worth doing what Savonarola and Eliano Montalto so highly recommend: “drive out one nail with another”—drive out one passion by another, or by its opposite, as they treat a nosebleed by drawing blood from the arm. Expel one fear with another, one grief with another. Cristóbal de Vega considers this rational medicine, “not contrary to reason.”

Lemnius strongly approves of “using a hard wedge for a hard knot”: driving out one disease with another, pulling out a tooth, wounding the patient, or castrating him, as Platter says was done to people with epilepsy in ancient times, because it completely alters the bodily constitution. Thus the pain of one may lessen the suffering caused by the other. “And I knew someone whose quartan fever was cured in this way, when his enemies suddenly came upon him.”

If we may believe Pliny, whom Scaliger calls “the father of falsehoods,” the father of lies, Quintus Fabius Maximus, that renowned Roman consul, was freed from a quartan fever in this way during a battle with the king of the Allobroges at the river Isaurus. Valesius, in his Controversies, considers this an excellent remedy and, if judiciously used for this illness, better than any medicine.

At other times it is worth deceiving them with a fabricated story, startling news, an ingenious device, or a contrivance. As they hate those who neglect or mock them, says Alexander, so they will listen to those who agree with them. If they say they have swallowed frogs or a snake, by all means agree, and tell them that you can easily cure it: it is an ordinary occurrence.

The physician Philodotus cured a melancholy king who thought his head had been cut off by putting a lead cap on it: the weight made him feel his head and freed him from his foolish imagining. A woman described by the same Alexander thought she had swallowed a serpent. He gave her an emetic and secretly placed a serpent of the kind she imagined in the basin; on seeing it, she recovered.