Melancholy used to be a humor, an excess of black bile. Aristotle
thought it was a divine gift, only given to men of true genius. In the
Middle Ages, melancholy's fetid vapors were thought to dim understanding
and perturb the soul. Of the four bodily humors - phlegm, yellow bile,
blood, and melancholy - the last was the coldest and driest. The
melancholic person had sunken eyes and a taciturn expression: he was
circumspect, stern, and solitary; insomniac and given to nightmares;
passionate and jealous. He had buy steroids online a waxen complexion, was flatulent, his
excretions were painful, his urine colorless and sparse. The cause of
melancholy, according to popular wisdom, was poor diet, and it was cured
by purges, unguents, poultices, and bloodletting.
Bastard daughter of melancholy, the term nostalgia inherited the
characteristics of black bile but never achieved its former divine
status. The magic humors of mother melancholy evaporated in the three
dry syllables of her aseptic daughter: nos-tal-gia. Like other such
"algias" as cephalalgia and neuralgia, nostalgia was, in the seventeenth
century, firmly fixed as a clinical condition. It's no surprise that
its appearance coincides with the era in which "afflictions of the soul"
became "pathologies of the psyche."
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