Disputatio de melancholia

so that we may collect what is not depraved; therefore, we rightly establish that the brain is an affected part, not as an instrumental part, but as a similar part.

XXIII.
Whether it has occurred primarily, or by consensus, and whether that is of the whole body or its parts, must also be distinguished by certain signs: since this also has no small momentum for treatment.

XXIIII.
Wherefore, that melancholia has been caused by the consensus of the whole body will be testified, beyond the persistence of symptoms, primarily as Galen teaches, by the leanness of the whole body, dryness, hairiness, the width of the veins, the dark, obscure, and blackish color of the face and the whole body, the weariness of the limbs, and with these the urine, whether it be thin and white, or thick, livid, and greenish, etc.

XXV.
And so that we may be more certain, according to the prescription of the same Galen, we shall observe the blood flowing from the middle vein of the arm having been cut. If it is melancholic, it must be suppressed immediately.

XXVI.
But if this same melancholia is not perpetual, but has occurred with an intermission, and at the same time has returned with other preceding symptoms (such as acid belching, stomach pain, heat in the precordia, indigestion, and convulsion of the precordia toward the upper parts), then we affirm that it was caused by the consensus of the stomach or other parts, and is Hypochondriaca hypochondriac.

XXVII.
And this is all the more so if the sufferers complain of pain in the hypochondria, and remedies applied to the brain have profited nothing.

XXVIII.
But if they are in the contrary state, and moreover, without an open cause, with fear and sadness (which are achōrita inseparable signs of Melancholia, as Hippocrates teaches), there follows a weariness of life and a flight from humans, these can be certain and indubitable signs of melancholia properly so-called for us.

XXIX.
Regarding the affection itself, although it is numbered among the kinds of diseases by some: yet according to Galen it is not a disease, but the symptoms of a cold and dry intemperance. And it seems that such a symptom, which consists in the injured action of the principal faculties—especially the imagination (from which it is also detected)—should be established.