and Lod. Mercatus, who in his second book
de
mulier. affect. cap. 4. will have that melancholy
of nuns, widows, and more ancient maids, to be a peculiar
species of melancholy differing from the rest:
some will reduce enthusiasts, ecstatical and demoniacal
persons to this rank, adding [1085] love melancholy
to the first, and lycanthropia. The most received
division is into three kinds. The first proceeds
from the sole fault of the brain, and is called head
melancholy; the second sympathetically proceeds from
the whole body, when the whole temperature is melancholy:
the third ariseth from the bowels, liver, spleen, or
membrane, called
mesenterium, named hypochondriacal
or windy melancholy, which [1086]Laurentius subdivides
into three parts, from those three members, hepatic,
splenetic, mesaraic. Love melancholy, which Avicenna
calls
ilishi: and Lycanthropia, which
he calls
cucubuthe, are commonly included in
head melancholy; but of this last, which Gerardus de
Solo calls
amoreus, and most knight melancholy,
with that of religious melancholy,
virginum et
viduarum, maintained by Rod. a Castro and Mercatus,
and the other kinds of love melancholy, I will speak
of apart by themselves in my third partition.
The three precedent species are the subject of my present
discourse, which I will anatomise and treat of through
all their causes, symptoms, cures, together and apart;
that every man that is in any measure affected with
this malady, may know how to examine it in himself,
and apply remedies unto it.
It is a hard matter, I confess, to distinguish these
three species one from the other, to express their
several causes, symptoms, cures, being that they are
so often confounded amongst themselves, having such
affinity, that they can scarce be discerned by the
most accurate physicians; and so often intermixed
with other diseases, that the best experienced have
been plunged. Montanus consil. 26, names
a patient that had this disease of melancholy and
caninus appetitus both together; and consil. 23,
with vertigo, [1087]Julius Caesar Claudinus with stone,
gout, jaundice. Trincavellius with an ague, jaundice,
caninus appetitus, &c. [1088]Paulus Regoline, a great
doctor in his time, consulted in this case, was so
confounded with a confusion of symptoms, that he knew
not to what kind of melancholy to refer it. [1089]Trincavellius,
Fallopius, and Francanzanus, famous doctors in Italy,
all three conferred with about one party, at the same
time, gave three different opinions. And in another
place, Trincavellius being demanded what he thought
of a melancholy young man to whom he was sent for,
ingenuously confessed that he was indeed melancholy,
but he knew not to what kind to reduce it. In
his seventeenth consultation there is the like disagreement
about a melancholy monk. Those symptoms, which
others ascribe to misaffected parts and humours, [1090]Herc.
de Saxonia attributes wholly to distempered spirits,