The Anatomy of Melancholy

Meanwhile, the part affected, Arnald supposes, “is the front of the head, through lack of moisture”—a view his commentator rejects.

Lange, Medical Letters, book 1, chapter 24, places this passion in the liver and has it reside in the heart: “It proceeds first from the eyes, is carried by our spirits, and is kindled by the imagination in the liver and heart.” “The liver compels one to love,” as the saying goes. “He strikes through the middle of the liver,” as Cupid does in Anacreon.

For some such reason, perhaps, Homer imagines the liver of Tityus, who was enamoured of Latona, being continually gnawed by two vultures, day and night in hell: “because the inward parts of young men so enamoured are continually tortured by love.”

Bernard of Gordon, chapter 2, part 2, “makes the testicles the immediate seat or cause, and the liver an antecedent cause.”

Fracastoro agrees with Gordon in this: “From there arise the first sexual fantasies, erection,” and so forth. He calls it “the most sensitive part, so that unless semen is discharged the exultant pleasure does not cease, nor the continual recollection of sex,” adds Guastavini in his commentary on Aristotle, section 4, problem 27.

But properly it is a disorder of the brain, like all other melancholy, arising from an impaired imagination. So Jason Pratensis, in chapter 19 of On Diseases of the Brain, where he writes at length about this erotic love, places and counts it among the disorders of the brain.

Melanchthon, On the Soul, refutes those who make the liver a part affected; and Guaineri, treatise 15, chapters 13 and 17, assigns it to the brain, although many place all the passions in the heart. Ficino, chapter 7 of his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, “makes the blood the part affected.” Johann Freitag, chapter 14 of Medical Nights, supposes all four to be affected—heart, liver, brain and blood—but the majority agree on the brain.

It is “an impaired imagination,” and both imagination and reason are disordered. Because of his faulty judgement and continual dwelling on what he desires, the sufferer may truly be called melancholic.

If the passion is violent or his disease long established, both imagination and reason are disordered, first one and then the other, as I have concluded in the preceding partitions.

And therefore he is rightly called melancholic: intense desire arising from a faulty judgement of the estimative faculty.