The Anatomy of Melancholy

Guainerio, in chapter 36 of On Diseases of the Womb, speaks of a foolish jealous man who, seeing his newborn child enclosed in a caul, was certain “that a Franciscan who used to visit his house was its father, because it looked so like the friar’s cowl; and he therefore threatened to kill the friar.” Fulgosius tells of a woman at Narbonne who cut off her husband’s genitals at night because she thought he was unfaithful to her.

The story of Yunus Pasha and his beautiful wife Manto is well known to those who have read the Turkish History, as is the story of Joan of Spain, which I discussed in the preceding section. Her jealousy, says Gomesius, caused both their deaths: King Philip died of grief shortly afterwards, as Martian, his physician, reported; “and she, for her part, after a melancholy, unhappy life wasted in lurking in holes and corners, brought her miseries to an end.”

Felix Pater, in the first book of his Observations, has many such examples: a physician he knew “who first went mad through jealousy and afterwards fell into despair”; a merchant “who killed his wife in the same state and afterwards threw himself from a height”; a doctor of law who cut off his servant’s nose; and a painter’s wife at Basel in 1600, the mother of nine children and married for twenty-seven years, who nevertheless became jealous afterwards, and so distressed that she fell into despair and would neither eat nor drink in her own house, for fear that her husband would poison her.

This is a common sign: once the humours are disturbed and the imagination affected, it will take different forms, accompanied by many such strange symptoms, even madness itself. Schenck, in his Observations, book 4, in the chapter on the womb, gives an example of a jealous woman who suffered many fits of the mother through this cause; and in his first book he writes of people driven mad by jealousy, and of a baker who castrated himself to test his wife’s chastity, and so on. Such examples are all too common.