or else those that pertain to the substance of the brain itself, in which are conceived frenzy, lethargy, melancholy, madness, weak memory, sopor, or Coma Vigilia et vigil Coma.  Out of these again I will single such as properly belong to the phantasy, or imagination, or reason itself, which [892]Laurentius calls the disease of the mind; and Hildesheim, morbos imaginationis, aut rationis laesae, (diseases of the imagination, or of injured reason,) which are three or four in number, frenzy, madness, melancholy, dotage, and their kinds:  as hydrophobia, lycanthropia, Chorus sancti viti, morbi daemoniaci, (St. Vitus’s dance, possession of devils,) which I will briefly touch and point at, insisting especially in this of melancholy, as more eminent than the rest, and that through all his kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, cures:  as Lonicerus hath done de apoplexia, and many other of such particular diseases.  Not that I find fault with those which have written of this subject before, as Jason Pratensis, Laurentius, Montaltus, T. Bright, &c., they have done very well in their several kinds and methods; yet that which one omits, another may haply see; that which one contracts, another may enlarge.  To conclude with [893]Scribanius, “that which they had neglected, or perfunctorily handled, we may more thoroughly examine; that which is obscurely delivered in them, may be perspicuously dilated and amplified by us:”  and so made more familiar and easy for every man’s capacity, and the common good, which is the chief end of my discourse.

SUBSECT.  IV.—­Dotage, Frenzy, Madness, Hydrophobia, Lycanthropia, Chorus sancti Viti, Extasis.

Delirium, Dotage.] Dotage, fatuity, or folly, is a common name to all the following species, as some will have it. [894]Laurentius and [895] Altomarus comprehended madness, melancholy, and the rest under this name, and call it the summum genus of them all.  If it be distinguished from them, it is natural or ingenite, which comes by some defect of the organs, and overmuch brain, as we see in our common fools; and is for the most part intended or remitted in particular men, and thereupon some are wiser than others:  or else it is acquisite, an appendix or symptom of some other disease, which comes or goes; or if it continue, a sign of melancholy itself.

Frenzy.] Phrenitis, which the Greeks derive from the word [Greek:  phraen], is a disease of the mind, with a continual madness or dotage, which hath an acute fever annexed, or else an inflammation of the brain, or the membranes or kells of it, with an acute fever, which causeth madness and dotage.  It differs from melancholy and madness, because their dotage is without an ague:  this continual, with waking, or memory decayed, &c.  Melancholy is most part silent, this clamorous; and many such like differences are assigned by physicians.