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175 5 The Jews and Melancholy Although certain foods, corrupt air, or illicit sexual encounters might introduce leprosy, physicians seeking its natural causes also sought an acceptable explanation in the language of Galenic humoralism. Already we have seen that the four bodily humors are related to the four types of leprosy: elephantia, leonina, tyria, and allopicia. Of these four types of leprosy or skin disease, elephantia , caused by adust (that is, “burned”) melancholy, was the most severe, and could be introduced by foods that increase the melancholic humor. Pork was one such food. Indeed, Haymo of Halberstadt (d. 853) complained of certain Christians who, like modern Pharisees, had refused to eat pork or eel because they had diagnosed themselves as melancholics.1 The monastic reformer Peter Damian (d. 1072) likewise condemns a tendency among hypochondriac monks to self-diagnose various ailments in order to prescribe a relaxed dietary regimen. They submit to frequent phlebotomy or the use of leeches to draw out harmful blood, and “take dainty food for their squeamish stomach,” to treat illnesses of their own invention.2 This complaint was echoed in the twelfth century by Bernard of Clairvaux, who reminded monks that they ought not to spurn the foods of the monastery or its fasts because, like physicians, they had diagnosed themselves as suffering from complexional imbalance.3 A century later, Jacques de 1. “id est secundum traditionem Scribarum et Pharisaeorum, et secundum illos qui causa infirmitatis nolunt ea comedere, dicentes: Nolo comedere carnem suillam quia melancholicus sum, neque anguillam.” Haymo of Halberstadt, Expositio in D. Pauli epistolas 2 (PL 117: 758D). 2. Peter Damian, Epist. 132.16, in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, 3: 446; translated in The Letters of Peter Damian, 121–150, 65. 3. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo 30.11, in Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, 176   The Jews and Melancholy Vitry complains of a certain Cistercian who, having been a physician before he entered the monastery, condemned the foods enjoined by his order as unhealthful and contrary to his complexion.4 Such complaints, however , merely reflect the medical judgment of the day, seeking to modify the monastic regimen in order to prevent various illnesses, including leprosy. While pork might dispose certain complexions to melancholy or leprosy, other “cold” foods as well could lead to leprosy. Gilbert the Englishman adds that elephantia “is brought on by melancholic foods, such as stale goat’s flesh, venison, or beef.”5 Although imbalances of the humors could be induced by diet or other external factors, heredity was also widely accepted as a cause of leprosy, both by medical practitioners and by educated churchmen. Jacques de Vitry repeated the common wisdom that “From lepers, very often lepers are produced.”6 This view was reiterated by Albert the Great, who remarked that because of a flaw in the sperm “a cripple commonly generates a cripple and a leper generates a leper.”7 In his massive commentary on Aristotle’s On Animals (De animalibus), Albert expands the causes of leprosy to include not only a flaw that stems from the fact that a leper cannot adequately complete the body’s fourth digestion that produces sperm, but also the deleterious influence of corrupt, black bile. Thus “it happens very often that flaws [occasiones] in the parents are reflected in the offspring, either in the same degree or worse. Thus one with gout begets one with gout, a leper a leper, and sometimes a cancerous person or one who is melancholic due to black bile [melancholia ] begets a leper.”8 Like Gilbert the Englishman, Albert includes leprosy—and elephantia in particular—among illnesses related to melancholy , adding, “When the spleen is weak in drawing in melancholy from the liver, melancholic illnesses befall the body, illnesses such as 2 vols., ed. Jean Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–58), 1: 217. Bernard’s complaint not only highlight’s the monks’ inclination to self-diagnosis , but also likely implies criticism of the concept of complexio, which had recently gained wider currency. Luke Demaitre (Leprosy in Premodern Medicine, 114) cites a similar complaint from Guibert of Tournai (c. 1260). 4. Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis 14, p. 303. 5. Gilbert the Englishman, “The Symptoms of Leprosy,” in Grant, A Sourcebook of Medieval Science, 754. 6. Jacques de Vitry, Historia Orientalis 92, p. 217. 7. Albert the Great, Quaestiones super de animalibus 15.13(3), p. 267 (QDA, 457). 8. Albert the Great, De animalibus 9.1.6.62, vol...

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