ABSTRACT
In his Optick Glasse of Humours (1607), Thomas Walkington recounts the story of a “humorous melancholick scholar” who was afraid to come in the company of others because he believed “his nose was bigger then his whole bodie, and that the weight of it weighed down his head” (137). The title of Walkington’s text and his diagnosis of the scholar as “humorous melancholick” draw the man’s case into the humoral discourse that largely governed early modern thought about various types of mental illness. This medical discourse, which early modern physicians had inherited from ancient writers such as Galen and Aristotle, viewed madness in the context of what we would today call a “disease model,” in which mental aberrations are understood in terms of a physical pathology (Ingleby 1982, 125–27). Specifically, early moderns believed that mental conditions resulted from a surplus or deficiency, or excessive digestion of one or more of the four humors that make up the human body. A melancholy or depressed individual, for instance, was thought to suffer from an excess of black, or of overly “concocted” or digested bile and possibly a deficiency of blood. Humor theory was not adverse to a consideration of other causes of mental illness, such as diet, behavior, witchcraft, demonic possession, fierce passions, and spiritual bewilderment, but a physiological condition was almost always viewed as central to the case. 1 Proposed cures for mental conditions therefore routinely sought to affect a physical change in the patient, a physical change that would bring about a proper balance between the humors and return the patient to mental health. One would therefore expect the melancholy scholar of Walkington’s Optick Glasse of Humours to be treated for his delusions about the size of his nose with herbs, medicines, spiritual guidance, behavior regiments, or a dietary change. But nothing of the sort occurs in the continuation of the account, for Walkington submits that patients like this scholar are not only “out of temper for their organs of body, but their minds also are so out of frame and distract, that they are in bondage to many ridiculous passions” (134). To cure the man in question of his conceit,
The Phisitions … invented this means, they tooke a great quantity of flesh, having the proportion of a nose, which they cunningly join’d to his face, whiles hee was a sleepe, then being waken they rased his skinne with a rasour till the bloud thrilled downe, and whiles hee cried out vehemently for the paine, the Physition with a jirke twitcht it from his face, and threw it away.
(Walkington 1603, 137)