SUBSECT. V.—_Bad Air, a cause of Melancholy_.
Air is a cause of great moment, in producing this, or any other disease, being that it is still taken into our bodies by respiration, and our more inner parts. [1505]If it be impure and foggy, it dejects the spirits, and causeth diseases by infection of the heart, as Paulus hath it, lib. 1. c. 49. Avicenna, lib. 1. Gal. de san. tuenda. Mercurialis, Montaltus, &c. [1506]Fernelius saith, A thick air thickeneth the blood and humours. [1507]Lemnius reckons up two main things most profitable, and most pernicious to our bodies; air and diet: and this peculiar disease, nothing sooner causeth [1508](Jobertus holds) than the air wherein we breathe and live. [1509]Such as is the air, such be our spirits; and as our spirits, such are our humours. It offends commonly if it be too [1510]hot and dry, thick, fuliginous, cloudy, blustering, or a tempestuous air. Bodine in his fifth Book, De repub. cap. 1, 5, of his Method of History, proves that hot countries are most troubled with melancholy, and that there are therefore in Spain, Africa, and Asia Minor, great numbers of mad men, insomuch that they are compelled in all cities of note, to build peculiar hospitals for them. Leo [1511]Afer, lib. 3. de Fessa urbe, Ortelius and Zuinger, confirm as much: they are ordinarily so choleric in their speeches, that scarce two words pass without railing or chiding in common talk, and often quarrelling in their streets. [1512]Gordonius will have every man take notice of it: Note this (saith he) that in hot countries it is far more familiar than in cold. Although this we have now said be not continually so, for as [1513]Acosta truly saith, under the Equator itself, is a most temperate habitation, wholesome air, a paradise of pleasure: the leaves ever green, cooling showers. But it holds in such as are intemperately hot, as [1514]Johannes a Meggen found in Cyprus, others in Malta, Aupulia, and the [1515]Holy Land, where at some seasons of the year is nothing but dust, their rivers dried up, the air scorching hot, and earth inflamed; insomuch that many pilgrims going barefoot for devotion sake, from Joppa to Jerusalem upon the hot sands, often run mad, or else quite overwhelmed with sand, profundis arenis, as in many parts of Africa, Arabia Deserta, Bactriana, now Charassan, when the west wind blows [1516]Involuti arenis transeuntes necantur. [1517]Hercules de Saxonia, a professor in Venice, gives this cause why so many Venetian women are melancholy, Quod diu sub sole degant, they tarry too long in the sun. Montanus, consil. 21, amongst other causes assigns this; Why that Jew his patient was mad, Quod tam multum exposuit se calori et frigori: he exposed himself so much to heat and cold, and for that reason in Venice, there is little stirring in those brick paved streets in summer about noon, they are most part then asleep: as they are likewise in the great Mogol's countries, and all over the East Indies. At Aden in Arabia, as [1518] Lodovicus Vertomannus relates in his travels, they keep their markets in the night, to avoid extremity of heat; and in Ormus, like cattle in a pasture, people of all sorts lie up to the chin in water all day long. At Braga in Portugal; Burgos in Castile; Messina in Sicily, all over Spain and Italy, their streets are most part narrow, to avoid the sunbeams. The Turks wear great turbans ad fugandos solis radios, to refract the sunbeams; and much inconvenience that hot air of Bantam in Java yields to our men, that sojourn there for traffic; where it is so hot, [1519]that they that are sick of the pox, lie commonly bleaching in the sun, to dry up their sores. Such a complaint I read of those isles of Cape Verde, fourteen degrees from the Equator, they do male audire: [1520]One calls them the unhealthiest clime of the world, for fluxes, fevers, frenzies, calentures, which commonly seize on seafaring men that touch at them, and all by reason of a hot distemperature of the air. The hardiest men are offended with this heat, and stiffest clowns cannot resist it, as Constantine affirms, Agricult. l. 2. c. 45. They that are naturally born in such air, may not [1521]endure it, as Niger records of some part of Mesopotamia, now called Diarbecha: Quibusdam in locis saevienti aestui adeo subjecta est, ut pleraque animalia fervore solis et coeli extinguantur, 'tis so hot there in some places, that men of the country and cattle are killed with it; and [1522]Adricomius of Arabia Felix, by reason of myrrh, frankincense, and hot spices there growing, the air is so obnoxious to their brains, that the very inhabitants at some times cannot abide it, much less weaklings and strangers. [1523]Amatus Lusitanus, cent. 1. curat.