Disputatio de melancholia

XXXVI.
Prognostic signs are various and multiple, and they promise a result in treatment that is either good or bad.

XXXVII.
Hence Alexander teaches that treatment is easy around the beginnings, but more difficult in the progress: as this inveterate affection, having been as it were turned into nature, becomes almost incurable.

XXXVIII.
Furthermore, as Hippocrates himself teaches, unless this melancholic humor, from which it is stirred, has been evacuated in time, it not only induces Apoplexy, convulsions of every kind, and blindness, but also, after being roasted a little later, it turns into black bile and excites mania or other most serious symptoms.

XXXIX.
Once the nature of the affection itself is known, the treatment must be instituted: which, although it can be done either legitimately or illegitimately, yet because of the long duration of the disease, we judge the former method to be preferred to the latter.

XL.
However, in whichever way it is instituted, one must proceed from the indications themselves, though without neglecting the co-indications and even the contra-indications: so that the physician not only understands what, whether, and by what aids that which he desires can and should be done, but also what it is convenient to administer at any time of the disease.

XLI.
What should be done, besides the strength of the patient, which indicates its own preservation or restoration, is also shown by the causes of the affection itself, both mediate and immediate: which, although it signifies its own removal by contraries, as Hippocrates teaches, yet since in certain affections it also happens through likes, as the same Hippocrates testifies, we think it can be rightly said that one and the same affection can be cured at one and the same time both through likes and through contraries.

XLII.
But whether we can achieve what we desire, both those things which have been commemorated in the prognostics, as well as the nobility of the suffering part and its site (to which the power of the medicines arrives more slowly because of the distance), insinuate that the treatment will be sufficiently difficult.