The Anatomy of Melancholy

SUBSECTION 2 Simple remedies suited to melancholy Against imported simples

Medicines appropriately used against melancholy are either simple or compound. Simples are either alterative or purgative. Alteratives correct or strengthen the body’s natural powers, bring about change, or in some way hinder or resist the disease. They include herbs, stones, minerals and other things suited to this humour. For just as many distinct illnesses continually afflict us—

Diseases come to people by day and by night, Roaming of themselves, bringing harm to mortals In silence, since wise Zeus took away their voice.

Diseases steal upon people by day and night, For Jupiter has taken their voice away.

so there are different remedies: as the writer says, “a medicine for each disease, for every humour.” Some hold that every climate, every country and, more than that, every particular place has its own remedies growing there, almost specially adapted to its prevailing and most frequent illnesses.

As one writer explains: “Wormwood grows sparsely in Italy, because people there are mostly afflicted by hot diseases; instead, henbane, poppy and similar cold herbs grow there. With us in Germany and Poland, wormwood abounds on every piece of waste ground.” Baricelli, in The Delightful Garden, and Giambattista della Porta, in Physiognomics, book 6, chapter 23, give many examples and bring forward much further proof.

Perhaps for this reason the learned Fuchs of Nuremberg, “whenever he came to a village, always considered which herbs grew most abundantly around it, and distilled those in a silver alembic,” using other herbs among them as occasion required.

I know that many believe our northern simples to be weak and imperfect, less thoroughly matured and less potent than those from southern regions, and less suited to medicine. They therefore fetch their drugs from far away: senna and cassia from Egypt, rhubarb from Barbary, aloes from Socotra; turpeth, agaric, myrobalans and hermodactyls from the East Indies; tobacco from the West Indies; some drugs from as far away as China; hellebore from Anticyra, or the Austrian variety with purple flowers so highly approved by Mattioli, and so with the rest.

In the kingdom of Valencia in Spain, Magini commends two mountains, Mariola and Renagolosa, famous for medicinal plants. Leandro Alberti commends Monte Baldo, near Lake Garda in the territory of Verona, to which all the region’s herbalists constantly flock; Ortelius, a mountain in Apulia; Münster, Monte Maggiore in Istria; and others, Montpellier in France. Prospero Alpini prefers Egyptian simples, Garcia da Orta those of India, others those of Italy, Crete and so on.