The Anatomy of Melancholy

In such cases compound medicines deserve approval, and Arnoldus allows them in his eighteenth aphorism: “If simples cannot do the work, necessity compels us to use compounds.” As for recipes and special formulations, “one day teaches another”—one day instructs the next. They resemble words and phrases, “the words now held in honour, if usage so wills.” They ebb and flow with the season, and as minds differ, so they can be endlessly varied.

Everyone has a favourite that captivates him.

Each man follows his own liking: as many minds as men, yet all working towards a good end, though by different paths. Like the other arts and sciences, medicine continues to improve. “The hours are the nurses of the Muses,” and experience teaches us every day many things our predecessors did not know. Nature, as he says, is not exhausted, nor so lavish as to bestow all her gifts on a single age. She has kept some for posterity, to show her power and prove that she is still the same, neither aged nor spent.

Birds and beasts can cure themselves by nature: “Through natural experience they commonly know things that human beings scarcely attain through long labour and learning.” But people must work hard and diligently to discover them. Yet I digress.

Compound medicines are taken internally or applied externally. Those taken internally are either liquid or solid; liquids are either fluid or thick. Fluids include wines and syrups. The wines ordinarily used for this disease are wormwood wine, tamarisk wine and buglossatum, a wine made from borage and bugloss. Arnoldus Villanovanus, in his Book of Wines, specifies its composition: borage, balm, bugloss, cinnamon and so on. It is highly praised for its powers:

“It drives away leprosy and scabs, clears the blood, refreshes the spirits, cheers the mind, purges the brain of those distressing black melancholic fumes, and cleanses the whole body of that black humour through the urine. To this I add,” says Villanovanus, “that it will restore reason to mad people and to raging lunatics who have been put in chains.”

“My conscience is my witness that I do not lie. I saw a respectable matron helped in this way. She was so irritable, and sometimes so furious, that she was almost mad and beside herself; she did not know what she was saying or doing, scolded and beat her maids, and was about to be bound. Then she drank this borage wine and was cured by that excellent remedy, which a poor stranger, a humble beggar going from door to door for alms, happened to teach her.”

Clarified borage juice drunk in wine will do as much, as will the sliced and steeped roots and so on, says Antoine Mizauld in The Art of Medicine. He quotes this story word for word from Villanovanus, as does Magninus, a physician of Milan, in his Regimen of Health.