The Anatomy of Melancholy

Resist the beginnings, avoid occasions, change one’s location; fair and foul means, contrary passions and ingenious devices; introduce another love and disparage the former

Our physicians prescribe other useful rules and precepts which, even if ineffective separately, may certainly do much when combined. The first is “to resist the beginnings”: “Whoever resisted at the outset and drove love away was safe and victorious.” Anyone who resists at first may easily conquer in the end.

Baldassare Castiglione, in book 4, presses this precept above the others: “When he happens,” he says, “to encounter a woman whose good manners accompany her excellent looks, and notices his eyes greedily drawing in this image of beauty and carrying it into his heart; when he finds himself somewhat inflamed by this influence stirring within, and discerns the subtle spirits sparkling in her eyes adding fuel to the fire: he must wisely resist the beginnings, rouse his almost stupefied reason, fortify his heart by every means, and close all the passages by which it may enter.”

It is a precept on which all agree:

Crush the evil seeds of sudden sickness while they are new; While you can, halt your foot at the very threshold.

Crush your sudden sickness by every means While it is fresh today; stop at the first step.

Nothing can accomplish this sooner than confessing his grief and passion to a discerning friend—“he who burns in silence burns the more”; the more he conceals, the greater his pain—whose good advice may perhaps bring immediate relief. At the same time he must avoid occasions, or any circumstance that may aggravate his disease, and remove the object of his passion by every means. For who can stand beside a fire and not burn?

Spring up, I beg you, and let her out— She drains the blood of me, her wretched lover.

It is therefore good to keep entirely out of her company, as Jerome so strongly urges upon Paula and Nepotian, and Chrysostom repeatedly insists in his sermon on living together. Cyprian and many other Church Fathers say the same, as do the son of Sirach in his ninth chapter, Jason Pratensis, Savonarola, Arnoldus, Valleriola and every physician who treats this subject.

Not only, as Gregory Tholosanus urges, to avoid kissing, dalliance, all conversation, gifts, love letters and the like; or, as Castiglione says in book 4, their company, their speaking or singing—“it is more bearable to hear a basilisk hiss,” says Cyprian: you would be better off hearing a serpent hiss—and those lovely smiles, wonderful graces and sweet gestures which their presence offers.

Let them not rasp heads with their usual nibbles, And from these little squeezes of the breasts Let them abstain—