FT242

There may not, as yet, be a new fortean science of cryptomedicine, but I haven’t been labouring away, secretly at night, in my laboratory for nothing! When I last wrote about the “lost” disease of chlorosis, I had begun to doubt myself, inclining to the view that it could have been illusory, a mere trick of the light [FT222:54–55]. Further research, however, has convinced me that it was a genuine and historically important disease. Chlorosis is or was defined as “a condition characterised by a yellowish-green colour… a form of anæmia affecting especially young girls at puberty. There is a yellowish-green colour to the skin.”

The condition was first described by Johann Lange in 1520 and called by him morbus virgineus or pallor of virgins. The term chlorosis was introduced by Jean Varandal (1560–1617). In 1681, the English physician Thomas Willis characterised it as “chlorosis, the green sickness, or the virgin’s disease”. It was described again by Friedrich Hoffman in 1730 in the treatise De genuina chlorosis indole. Shakespeare mentions “green sickness” several times. One quotation, Viola’s speech in Twelfth Night, is doubly enigmatic: “And with a green and yellow melancholy, / She sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.” In any event, chlorosis is no longer with us. By the 1950s, “both the disease and the term (were) disappearing.” [1]

Melancholy, a condition due to an ineluctable humour known as black bile, remains one of the greatest unsolved problems of medicine. The Greek word melancholia comes from melas, -anos (black) and chole (bile). In classical medicine, the humoral theory explained all dispositions and the disorders resulting from them. There were four basic humours. Three were very real and immediately recognisable: blood; phlegm, or mucus; and choler, the yellowish bile produced by the liver. All three are real bodily fluids. The fourth, black bile, the cause of melancholy when in surfeit, is altogether more enigmatic. It could just be that fourness is an ancient concept of essential elements. The fifth, the quintessence, made something more essentially what it was. No one, nevertheless, to this day has come up with a satisfactory explanation of what black bile was ever supposed to be. Choler was believed to cause diarrhoea, as in cholera. A logical extension to this belief is that black bile produced the dark constipated stool of melancholia.

A serious attempt to unravel the enigma of melancholy and its attendant black bile was Robert Burton’s masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy, [2]  originally designed as a medical treatise. The reclusive clergyman’s work ran to five editions and half a million words. The conclusions he came to, after a lifetime of enormous effort, was that for black bile “there is no nook or cranny of the mind into which this ‘roving humour’ has not insinuated itself. It is ‘inbred in every one of us.’” Given what we now know about the brain chemistry and genetics of manic-depressive or bi-polar disorder, Burton was a man astonishingly ahead of his time. He also highlighted the essential conundrum of melancholy: it is often associated with genius.

One of the most famous artistic depictions of melan­cholia is Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), known as early as 1498 for his Apocalypse. In Melencolia I, there are a number of negative images, as expected: a black sun, a meteoric monster and the inevitable black dog. There is also a symbol of great genius or erudition, a Roman square of numbers that add up to 34, when read transversely, longitudinally or obliquely, a far more intellectual conundrum than even the fiendish Su Doku:

16     3     2    13

 5    10    11     8

 9     6     7    12

 4    15    14     1

Many comic geniuses have been melancholic. Insane institutions were once cruelly described as “laughing academies”, famously misportrayed in the 1960s pop song “They’re coming to take me away, Ha! Ha!”. Nevertheless, a surprising number of comedians have been melancholic, from Joseph Grimaldi – who invented the role of the clown in the circus in early 19th-century London – via Tony Hancock, through to many self-confessed melancholics at the present time. One of the highest achieving 20th-century melancholics was Sir Winston Churchill, plagued all his life by his “black dog” – coming from a noble family descended from the Duke of Marlborough, he would have been familiar with the idea of a hereditary curse, almost inevitably taking the form of a black dog.

NOTES
[1] Henry Alan Skinner: The Origin of Medical Terms, Balliere Tindall & Cox, 1949, 2nd ed. 1961.
[2] “Under the Black Sun – A review of 300 works on Mélancolie, Exhibition at the Galaries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris”, Times Literary Supplement, 20/30 Dec 2005.