for vengeance," Ecclus. xxxix. 29. The heavens threaten us with their comets, stars, planets, with their great conjunctions, eclipses, oppositions, quartiles, and such unfriendly aspects. The air with his meteors, thunder and lightning, intemperate heat and cold, mighty winds, tempests, unseasonable weather; from which proceed dearth, famine, plague, and all sorts of epidemical diseases, consuming infinite myriads of men. At Cairo in Egypt, every third year, (as it is related by "Boterus, and others) 300,000 die of the plague; and 200,000, in Constantinople, every fifth or seventh at the utmost. How doth the earth terrify and oppress us with terrible earthquakes, which are most frequent in "China, Japan, and those eastern climes, swallowing up sometimes six cities at once? How doth the water rage with his inundatious, irruptions, flinging down towns, cities, villages, bridges, &c, besides shipwrecks; whole islands. are sometimes suddenly overwhelmed with all their inhabitants in ° Zealand, Holland, and many parts of the continent drowned, as the P lake Erne in Ireland? Nihilque præter arcium cadavera patenti cernimus freto. In the fens of Friesland 1230, by reason of tempests, "the sea drowned multa hominum millia, et jumenta sine numero, all the country almost, men and cattle in it. How doth the fire rage, that merciless element, consuming in an instant whole cities? What town of any antiquity or note hath not been once, again and again, by the fury of this merciless element, defaced, ruinated, and left desolate? In a word, q "Ignis pepercit, unda mergit, aëris Vis pestilentis æquori ereptum necat, "Whom fire spares, sea doth drown; whom sca, Pestilent air doth send to clay; Whom war 'scapes, sickness takes away." To descend to more particulars, how many creatures are at deadly feud with men? Lions, wolves, bears, &c. Some with hoofs, horns, tusks, teeth, nails : How many noxious serpents and venomous creatures, ready to offend us with stings, breath, sight, or quite kill us? How many pernicious fishes, plants, gums, fruits, seeds, flowers, &c., could I reckon up on a sudden, which by their very smell many of them, touch, taste, cause some grievous malady, if not death itself? Some make mention of a thousand several poisons: but these are but trifles in respect. The greatest enemy to man, is man, who by the devil's instigation is still ready to do mischief, his own executioner, a wolf, a devil to himself, and others.* We are all brethren in Christ, or at least should be, members of one body, servants of one Lord, and yet no fiend can so torment, insult over, tyrannize, vex, as one man doth another. Let me not fall therefore (saith David, when wars, plague, famine were offered) into the hands of men, merciless and wicked men: We can most part foresee these epidemical diseases, and likely avoid them; Dearths, tempests, plagues, our astrologers foretel us; Earthquakes, inundations, ruins of houses, consuming fires, come by little and little, or make some noise beforehand; but the knaveries, impostures, injuries and villanies of men no art can avoid. We can keep our professed enemies from our cities, by gates, walls, and towers, defend ourselves from thieves and robbers by watchfulness and weapons; but this malice of men, and their pernicious endeavours, no caution can divert, no vigilancy foresee, we have so many secret plots and devices to mischief one another. Sometimes by the devil's help as magicians, 'witches: sometimes by impos m Boterus de Inst. urbium. Lege hist. relationem Lod. Frois de rebus Japonicis ad annuin 1596. Guicciard. descript. Belg. anno 1421. P Giraldus Cambrens. 9 Janus Dousa, ep. lib. 1. car. 10. And we perceive nothing, except the dead bodies of cities in the open sea. Buchanan. Baptist. Miscent aconita noverca Homo homini lupus, homo homini dæmon. Munster. 1. 3. Cos. cap. 462. tures, mixtures, poisons, stratagems, single combats, wars, we hack and hew, as if we were ad internecionem nati, like Cadmus' soldiers born to consume one another. 'Tis an ordinary thing to read of a hundred and two hundred thousand men slain in a battle. Besides all manner of tortures, brazen bulls, racks, wheels. strapadoes, guns, engines, &c. Ad unum corpus humanum supplicia plura, quam membra: We have invented more torturing instruments, than there be several members in a man's body, as Cyprian well observes. To come nearer yet, our own parents by their offences, indiscretion and intemperance, are our mortal enemies. The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." They cause our grief many times, and put upon us hereditary diseases, inevitable infirmities: they torment us, and we are ready to injure our posterity; "mox daturi progeniem vitiosiorem." 66 ▾ "And yet with crimes to us unknown, and the latter end of the world, as 'Paul foretold, is still like to be the worst. We are thus bad by nature, bad by kind, but far worse by art, every man the greatest enemy unto himself. We study many times to undo ourselves, abusing those good gifts which God hath bestowed upon us, health, wealth, strength, wit. learning, art, memory to our own destruction, Perditio tua ex te. As Judas Maccabeus killed Apollonius with his own weapons, we arm ourselves to our own overthrows; and use reason, art, judgment, all that should help us, as so many instruments to undo us. Hector gave Ajax a sword, which so long as he fought against enemies, served for his help and defence; but after he began to hurt harmless creatures with it, turned to his own hurtless bowels. Those excellent means God hath bestowed on us, well employed, cannot but much avail us; but in otherwise perverted, they ruin and confound us and so by reason of our indiscretion and weakness they commonly do, we have too many instances. This St. Austin acknowledgeth of himself in his humble confessions, "promptness of wit, memory, eloquence, they were God's good gifts, but he did not use them to his glory." If you will particularly know how, and by what means, consult physicians, and they will tell you, that it is in offending in some of those six non-natural things, of which I shall dilate more at large; they are the causes of our infirmities, our surfeiting, and drunkenness, our immoderate insatiable lust, and prodigious riot. Plures crapula, quam gladius, is a true saying, the board consumes more than the sword. Our intemperance it is, that pulls so many several incurable diseases upon our heads, that hastens 'old age, perverts our temperature, and brings upon us sudden death. And last of all, that which crucifies us most, is our own folly, madness, (quos Jupiter perdit, dementat; by subtraction of his assisting grace God permits it) weakness, want of government, our facility and proneness in yielding to several lusts, in giving way to every passion and perturbation of the mind: by which means we metamorphose ourselves and degenerate into beasts. All which that prince of poets observed of Agamemnon, that when he was well pleased, and could moderate his passion, he was-os oculos osque Jovi par: like Jupiter in feature, Mars in valour, Pallas in wisdom, another god; but when he became angry, he was a lion, a tiger, a dog, &c., there appeared no sign or likeness of Jupiter in him; so we, as long as we are ruled by reason, correct our inordinate appetite, and conform ourselves to God's word, are as so many saints: but if we give reins to lust, anger, ambition, pride, and follow our own ways, we degenerate into beasts, Ezech. xviii. 2. Hor. 1. 3 Od. 6. * 2 Tim. iii. 2. Part 1. Sec. 2. Memb. 2 Lib. 2. Epist. 2. ad Donatum. ? Fzec. xviii. 31. Thy destruction is from thyself. Nequitia est quæ te non sinet esse senem. transform ourselves, overthrow our constitutions, provoke God to anger, and heap upon us this of melancholy, and all kinds of incurable diseases, as a just and deserved punishment of our sins. SUBSECT. II. The Definition, Number, Division of Diseases. 66 an hinTho WHAT a disease is, almost every physician defines. Fernelius calleth it an "Affection of the body contrary to nature." 'Fuschius and Crato, derance, hurt, or alteration of any action of the body, or part of it.” losanus, "a dissolution of that league which is between body and soul, and a perturbation of it; as health the perfection, and makes to the preservation of it." Labeo in Agellius, " an ill habit of the body, opposite to nature, hindering the use of it." Others otherwise, all to this effect. Number of Diseases.] How many diseases there are, is a question not yet determined; 'Pliny reckons up 300 from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot: elsewhere he saith, morborum infinita multitudo, their number is infinite. Howsoever it was in those times, it boots not; in our days I am sure the number is much augmented: "macies, et nova febrium Terris incubat cohors." For besides many epidemical diseases unheard of, and altogether unknown to Galen and Hippocrates, as scorbutum, 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 constitution, 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 * Pliny, that may happily live 105 years without any manner of impediment; a Pollio Romulus, that can preserve himself "" 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 "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, " could not remember that ever he was sick." P 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 'Hesiod is true : 0 “ Πλείη μὲν γὰρ γαῖα κακῶν, πλειη δὲ θάλασσα, Νούσοιδ ̓ ἄνθρωποι ειν ἐφ' ἡμέρη, ἠδ ̓ ἐπὶ νυκτὶ 'Αυτόματοι φοιτώσι.". "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; they will tell you of acute and chronic, first and secondary, lethales, salutares, errant, fixed, simple, compound, connexed, or consequent, belonging to parts or the whole, in Crato. d Intemperantia. luxus, ingluvies, et infinita hujusmodi flagitia, quae divinas pœnas merentur. Fern. Path. 1. 1. c. Morbus est affectus contra naturam corpori insidens. f Fu-ch. Instit. 1 3. Sect. 1. c. 3. à quo primum vitiatur actio. g Dissolutio fœderis in corpore, ut sanitas est consummatio, h Lib. 4. cap 2. Morbus est habitus contra naturam, qui usum ejus, &c. Cap. 11. lib. 7. * Horat. lib. 1. ode 3 Emaciation, and a new cohort of fevers broods over the earth." k Can. 50. lib 7. Centum et quinque vixit namos sine ullo incommodo. m Intus mulso, for is oleo. Exemplis genitu". præfixis Ephemer cap, de infirmitat. Qui, quoad pueritiæ ultimam memoriam recordari potest non meminit se ægrotum decubuisse P Lib de vita lonza Oper. et Dies. See Fernelius Path. lib. L cap. 9. 10, 11, 12. Fuschius instit 1. 3. sect. 1. c. 7. Wecker. Synt. 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, Institut. lib. 3, sect. 1, cap. 11. I refer you to the voluminous tomes of Galen, Areteus, Rhasis, Avicenna, Alexander, Paulus Ætius, 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 Ilead. u THESE diseases of the mind, forasmuch as they have their chief seat and »rgans 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 'Heurnius, (which he takes out of Arculanus,) are in ward or outward (to omit all others which pertain to eyes and ears, nostrils, gums, teeth, mouth, palate, tongue, wesel, chops, face, &c.) belonging properly to the brain, as baldness, falling of hair, furfaire, lice, &c. Inward belonging to the skins next to the brain, called dura and pia mater, as all head-aches, &c., or to the ventricles, caules, kels, tunicles, creeks, and parts of it, and their passions, 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 *Laurentius calls the diseases of the mind; and Hildesheim, morbos imaginationis, aut rationis læsæ, (diseases of the imagination, or of injured reason,) which are three or four in number, phrensy, madness, melancholy, dotage, and their kinds: as hydrophobia, lycanthropia, Chorus sancti viti, morbi dæmoniaci, (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 apoplexiâ, 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 Scribanius, "that which they had neglected, or profunctorily 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. y SUBSECT. IV.-Dotage, Phrensy, 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. Laurentius and Altomarus comprehended madness, melancholy, and the rest under this name, and call it the Præfat. de morbis capitis. In capite ut variæ habitant partes. Its variæ querelæ ibi eveniunt. which read Heurnius, Montaltus, Hildesheim, Quercetan, Jason Pratensis, &c. Cap. 2 de melanchol. Cap. 2. de Phisiologia sagarum; Quod alii minus recte fortasse dixerint, nos examinare, melius dijudicare, corrigere studeamus. Cap 4. de mol. Art. Med. 7. 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 over-much 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; ot if it continue, a sign of melancholy itself. Phrensy.] Phrenitis, which the Greeks derive from the word "v, 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 kels 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. b Madness.] Madness, phrensy, and melancholy are confounded by Celsus and many writers; others leave out phrensy, and make madness and melancholy but one disease, which Jason Pratensis especially labours, and that they differ only secundum majus or minus, in quantity alone, the one being a degree to the other, and both proceeding from one cause. They differ intenso et remisso gradu, saith Gordonius, as the humour is intended or remitted. Of the same mind is Areteus, Alexander Tertullianus, Guianerius, Savanarola, Heurnins; 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 phrensy, 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. 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;' 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, 1. 3, cap. 18. Extasi omnia prædicere, answer all questions in an extasis 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 Beda 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. Ætius and Paulus call it a kind of melancholy; but I should rather refer it to madness, as most do. Some make a doubt of it Plerique medici uno complexu perstringunt hos duos morbos, quod ex eadem causa oriantur, quodque magnitudine et modo solùm distent, et alter gradus ad alterum existat. Jason Pratens. Lib. Med. Pars maniæ mihi videtur. • Insanus est, qui ætate debitâ, et tempore debito per se, non momentaneam et fugacem, ut vini, solani, Hyoscyami, sed confirmatam habet impotentiam bene operandi circa intellectum. lib. 2. de intellectioue. Of which read Felix Plater, cap. 3. de mentis alienatione. Lib. 5. cap. 11. Lib. 3. cap. 16. |