Part 12 (1/2)
[882] ------”macies, et nova febrium Terris incubit cohors.”
For besides many epidemical diseases unheard of, and altogether unknown to Galen and Hippocrates, as s...o...b..tum, small-pox, plica, sweating sickness, morbus Gallicus, &c., we have many proper and peculiar almost to every part.
_No man free from some Disease or other_.] No man amongst us so sound, of so good a const.i.tution, that hath not some impediment of body or mind.
_Quisque suos patimur manes_, we have all our infirmities, first or last, more or less. There will be peradventure in an age, or one of a thousand, like Zenophilus the musician in [883]Pliny, that may happily live 105 years without any manner of impediment; a Pollio Romulus, that can preserve himself [884]”with wine and oil;” a man as fortunate as Q. Metellus, of whom Valerius so much brags; a man as healthy as Otto Herwardus, a senator of Augsburg in Germany, whom [885]Leovitius the astrologer brings in for an example and instance of certainty in his art; who because he had the significators in his geniture fortunate, and free from the hostile aspects of Saturn and Mars, being a very cold man, [886]”could not remember that ever he was sick.” [887]Paracelsus may brag that he could make a man live 400 years or more, if he might bring him up from his infancy, and diet him as he list; and some physicians hold, that there is no certain period of man's life; but it may still by temperance and physic be prolonged. We find in the meantime, by common experience, that no man can escape, but that of [888]Hesiod is true:
”[Greek: pleiae men gar gaia kakon, pleiae de thala.s.sa, nousoid' anthropoi ein eph' haemerae, aed' epi nukti Hautomatoi phoitosi.]”------
”Th' earth's full of maladies, and full the sea, Which set upon us both by night and day.”
_Division of Diseases_.] If you require a more exact division of these ordinary diseases which are incident to men, I refer you to physicians; [889]they will tell you of acute and chronic, first and secondary, lethals, salutares, errant, fixed, simple, compound, connexed, or consequent, belonging to parts or the whole, in habit, or in disposition, &c. My division at this time (as most befitting my purpose) shall be into those of the body and mind. For them of the body, a brief catalogue of which Fuschius hath made, _Inst.i.tut. lib. 3, sect. 1, cap. 11._ I refer you to the voluminous tomes of Galen, Areteus, Rhasis, Avicenna, Alexander, Paulus Aetius, Gordonerius: and those exact Neoterics, Savanarola, Capivaccius, Donatus Altomarus, Hercules de Saxonia, Mercurialis, Victorius Faventinus, Wecker, Piso, &c., that have methodically and elaborately written of them all. Those of the mind and head I will briefly handle, and apart.
SUBSECT. III.--_Division of the Diseases of the Head_.
These diseases of the mind, forasmuch as they have their chief seat and organs in the head, which are commonly repeated amongst the diseases of the head which are divers, and vary much according to their site. For in the head, as there be several parts, so there be divers grievances, which according to that division of [890]Heurnius, (which he takes out of Arcula.n.u.s,) are inward or outward (to omit all others which pertain to eyes and ears, nostrils, gums, teeth, mouth, palate, tongue, weezle, chops, face, &c.) belonging properly to the brain, as baldness, falling of hair, furfur, lice, &c. [891]Inward belonging to the skins next to the brain, called _dura_ and _pia mater_, as all headaches, &c., or to the ventricles, caules, kells, tunicles, creeks, and parts of it, and their pa.s.sions, as caro, vertigo, incubus, apoplexy, falling sickness. The diseases of the nerves, cramps, stupor, convulsion, tremor, palsy: or belonging to the excrements of the brain, catarrhs, sneezing, rheums, distillations: 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 a.s.signed by physicians.
_Madness_.] Madness, frenzy, and melancholy are confounded by Celsus, and many writers; others leave out frenzy, and make madness and melancholy but one disease, which [896]Jason Pratensis especially labours, and that they differ only _secundam majus_ or _minus_, in quant.i.ty alone, the one being a degree to the other, and both proceeding from one cause. They differ _intenso et remisso gradu_, saith [897]Gordonius, as the humour is intended or remitted. Of the same mind is [898]Areteus, Alexander Tertullia.n.u.s, Guianerius, Savanarola, Heurnius; and Galen himself writes promiscuously of them both by reason of their affinity: but most of our neoterics do handle them apart, whom I will follow in this treatise. Madness is therefore defined to be a vehement dotage; or raving without a fever, far more violent than melancholy, full of anger and clamour, horrible looks, actions, gestures, troubling the patients with far greater vehemency both of body and mind, without all fear and sorrow, with such impetuous force and boldness, that sometimes three or four men cannot hold them. Differing only in this from frenzy, that it is without a fever, and their memory is most part better. It hath the same causes as the other, as choler adust, and blood incensed, brains inflamed, &c. [899]Fracastorius adds, ”a due time, and full age” to this definition, to distinguish it from children, and will have it confirmed impotency, to separate it from such as accidentally come and go again, as by taking henbane, nightshade, wine, &c.
Of this fury there be divers kinds; [900]ecstasy, which is familiar with some persons, as Cardan saith of himself, he could be in one when he list; in which the Indian priests deliver their oracles, and the witches in Lapland, as Olaus Magnus writeth, _l. 3, cap. 18._ _Extasi omnia praedicere_, answer all questions in an ecstasis you will ask; what your friends do, where they are, how they fare, &c. The other species of this fury are enthusiasms, revelations, and visions, so often mentioned by Gregory and Bede in their works; obsession or possession of devils, sibylline prophets, and poetical furies; such as come by eating noxious herbs, tarantulas stinging, &c., which some reduce to this. The most known are these, lycanthropia, hydrophobia, chorus sancti Viti.
_Lycanthropia_.] Lycanthropia, which Avicenna calls _cucubuth_, others _lupinam insaniam_, or wolf-madness, when men run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves, or some such beasts. [901]Aetius and [902]Paulus call it a kind of melancholy; but I should rather refer it to madness, as most do. Some make a doubt of it whether there be any such disease. [903]Donat ab Altomari saith, that he saw two of them in his time: [904]Wierus tells a story of such a one at Padua 1541, that would not believe to the contrary, but that he was a wolf.
He hath another instance of a Spaniard, who thought himself a bear; [905]Forrestus confirms as much by many examples; one amongst the rest of which he was an eyewitness, at Alcmaer in Holland, a poor husbandman that still hunted about graves, and kept in churchyards, of a pale, black, ugly, and fearful look. Such belike, or little better, were king Praetus'
[906]daughters, that thought themselves kine. And Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel, as some interpreters hold, was only troubled with this kind of madness.
This disease perhaps gave occasion to that bold a.s.sertion of [907]Pliny, ”some men were turned into wolves in his time, and from wolves to men again:” and to that fable of Pausanias, of a man that was ten years a wolf, and afterwards turned to his former shape: to [908]Ovid's tale of Lycaon, &c. He that is desirous to hear of this disease, or more examples, let him read Austin in his 18th book _de Civitate Dei, cap. 5._ Mizaldus, _cent. 5.
77._ Sckenkius, _lib. 1._ Hildesheim, _spicel. 2. de Mania_. Forrestus _lib. 10. de morbis cerebri._ Olaus Magnus, Vincentius Bellavicensis, _spec. met. lib. 31. c. 122._ Pierius, Bodine, Zuinger, Zeilger, Peucer, Wierus, Spranger, &c. This malady, saith Avicenna, troubleth men most in February, and is nowadays frequent in Bohemia and Hungary, according to [909]Heurnius. Scheretzius will have it common in Livonia. They lie hid most part all day, and go abroad in the night, barking, howling, at graves and deserts; [910]”they have usually hollow eyes, scabbed legs and thighs, very dry and pale,” [911]saith Altomarus; he gives a reason there of all the symptoms, and sets down a brief cure of them.
_Hydrophobia_ is a kind of madness, well known in every village, which comes by the biting of a mad dog, or scratching, saith [912]Aurelia.n.u.s; touching, or smelling alone sometimes as [913]Sckenkius proves, and is incident to many other creatures as well as men: so called because the parties affected cannot endure the sight of water, or any liquor, supposing still they see a mad dog in it. And which is more wonderful; though they be very dry, (as in this malady they are) they will rather die than drink: [914]de Venenis Caelius Aurelia.n.u.s, an ancient writer, makes a doubt whether this Hydrophobia be a pa.s.sion of the body or the mind. The part affected is the brain: the cause, poison that comes from the mad dog, which is so hot and dry, that it consumes all the moisture in the body. [915]
Hildesheim relates of some that died so mad; and being cut up, had no water, scarce blood, or any moisture left in them. To such as are so affected, the fear of water begins at fourteen days after they are bitten, to some again not till forty or sixty days after: commonly saith Heurnius, they begin to rave, fly water and gla.s.ses, to look red, and swell in the face, about twenty days after (if some remedy be not taken in the meantime) to lie awake, to be pensive, sad, to see strange visions, to bark and howl, to fall into a swoon, and oftentimes fits of the falling sickness. [916]
Some say, little things like whelps will be seen in their urine. If any of these signs appear, they are past recovery. Many times these symptoms will not appear till six or seven months after, saith [917]Codronchus; and sometimes not till seven or eight years, as Guianerius; twelve as Albertus; six or eight months after, as Galen holds. Baldus the great lawyer died of it: an Augustine friar, and a woman in Delft, that were [918]Forrestus'
patients, were miserably consumed with it. The common cure in the country (for such at least as dwell near the seaside) is to duck them over head and ears in sea water; some use charms: every good wife can prescribe medicines. But the best cure to be had in such cases, is from the most approved physicians; they that will read of them, may consult with Dioscorides, _lib. 6. c. 37_, Heurnius, Hildesheim, Capivaccius, Forrestus, Sckenkius and before all others Codronchus an Italian, who hath lately written two exquisite books on the subject.
_Chorus sancti Viti_, or St. Vitus's dance; the lascivious dance, [919]
Paracelsus calls it, because they that are taken from it, can do nothing but dance till they be dead, or cured. It is so called, for that the parties so troubled were wont to go to St. Vitus for help, and after they had danced there awhile, they were [920]certainly freed. 'Tis strange to hear how long they will dance, and in what manner, over stools, forms, tables; even great bellied women sometimes (and yet never hurt their children) will dance so long that they can stir neither hand nor foot, but seem to be quite dead. One in red clothes they cannot abide. Music above all things they love, and therefore magistrates in Germany will hire musicians to play to them, and some l.u.s.ty st.u.r.dy companions to dance with them. This disease hath been very common in Germany, as appears by those relations of [921]Sckenkius, and Paracelsus in his book of Madness, who brags how many several persons he hath cured of it. Felix Plateras _de mentis alienat. cap. 3_, reports of a woman in Basil whom he saw, that danced a whole month together. The Arabians call it a kind of palsy. Bodine in his 5th book _de Repub. cap. 1_, speaks of this infirmity; Monavius in his last epistle to Scoltizius, and in another to Dudithus, where you may read more of it.
The last kind of madness or melancholy, is that demoniacal (if I may so call it) obsession or possession of devils, which Platerus and others would have to be preternatural: stupend things are said of them, their actions, gestures, contortions, fasting, prophesying, speaking languages they were never taught, &c. Many strange stories are related of them, which because some will not allow, (for Deacon and Darrel have written large volumes on this subject pro and con.) I voluntarily omit.
[922]Fuschius, _Inst.i.tut. lib. 3. sec. 1. cap. 11_, Felix Plater, [923]Laurentius, add to these another fury that proceeds from love, and another from study, another divine or religious fury; but these more properly belong to melancholy; of all which I will speak [924]apart, intending to write a whole book of them.