ABSTRACT
If there be hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart. – Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Is love melancholy a state of mind or a veritable illness? Seventeenth-century doctors such as Jacques Ferrand and Robert Burton inquired at length about the causes and symptoms of so-called erotic melancholy, which was difficult to classify in terms of the three-fold divisions of melancholy – of the brain, the body, and the hypochondrium – and presented great difficulties of definition. The problem was that an external cause lay at its source. An unexpected encounter with a person with whom the subject falls madly in love may produce humoral reactions that affect the brain and create mental disturbances (such as a depraved imagination, sorrow, or strange visions) and physical symptoms (exhaustion, insomnia). Burton and Ferrand did not omit to illustrate the pathology of erotic melancholy and warned that this particular type produced real and harmful effects. Both doctors sought a cure for its undesirable manifestations, which could be conceived of as a true malady.
