The Anatomy of Melancholy

SUBSECTION 2 Corrective medicines to expel wind. Against constipation, and so on

In this kind of melancholy one of the most troublesome symptoms is wind, which needs to be corrected and expelled here just as in the other kinds.

Medicines to expel it are taken internally or applied externally. Internal medicines for expelling wind are simple or compound. Simple medicines are herbs, roots and the like: galangal, gentian, angelica, elecampane, sweet flag, valerian, zedoary, iris, preserved ginger, birthwort, cyclamen, China root, dittander, pennyroyal, rue, calamint, bay berries and bay leaves, betony, rosemary, hyssop, savin, centaury, mint, camomile, French lavender, chaste tree, broom flowers, oregano, orange peel, and so on.

Spices include saffron, cinnamon, bezoar stone, myrrh, mace, nutmegs, pepper, cloves and ginger; seeds of anise, fennel, ammi, caraway, nettle and rue; juniper berries and grains of paradise. Compounds include dianisum, diagalanga, diaciminum, diacalaminth, electuary of bay berries, benedicta laxativa, powder against wind from the Florentine Antidotary, carminative powder, aromaticum rosatum, theriac, mithridate, and so on.

This one caution from Walter Bruel must be observed when administering these hot and dry medicines: in trying to expel wind, do not inflame the blood and increase the disease. Sometimes, as he says, medicines must tend more towards heat, sometimes more towards cold, as circumstances require and according to the person’s tendency towards heat or cold.

External applications to expel wind include oils of camomile, rue and bay; warm applications to the regions beneath the ribs, using decoctions of dill, pennyroyal, rue, bay leaves and cumin; sachets of camomile flowers, aniseed, cumin, bay, rue and wormwood; and ointments of spikenard, wormwood or rue oil, and the like. Aretaeus prescribes poultices of camomile flowers, fennel, aniseed, cumin, rosemary, wormwood leaves and so on.

Cupping glasses applied beneath the ribs, without scarification, disperse wind wonderfully. Fernel, consultation 43, strongly approves of applying them to the lower belly. Lod. Mercatus calls them a powerful remedy and further testifies from his own knowledge how many people he has seen suddenly relieved by them. Julius Caesar Claudinus, Medical Responses, response 33, admires these cupping glasses, calling them, after Galen, a kind of enchantment: so immediate is the relief they bring.

Empirical practitioners have countless remedies, such as swallowing a lead bullet, which I deliberately omit. Amatus Lusitanus, fourth hundred of cases, treatment 54, prescribes a strange remedy for a person with hypochondriacal melancholy who was severely tormented by wind. Put the end of a pair of bellows into an enema pipe; insert it into the anus, open the bowels, and so draw out the wind: “Nature does not permit a vacuum.”

He boasts that he was the first to invent this remedy and that by its means he quickly relieved a melancholic man. For further treatment of this flatulent melancholy, read Fienus, On Wind, chapter 26 and elsewhere throughout the work.

For headache, dizziness and vapours that rise from the stomach to trouble the head, read Hercules de Saxonia and others.