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I N T R O D U C T I O N : C A S E S I N H I S T O R Y The Western Tradition T H E A S S O C I A T I O N B E T W E E N P A S S I O N A T E L O V E A N D I L L N E S S H A S A L O N G history, in both medicine and literature, and is not unique to Western civilization .1 Western literature and medicine, however, through a long process of interaction and mutual enrichment, have developed a distinct tradition of theorizing and representing lovesickness. Scholars have traced this concept ’s scientific roots to Greek medical and philosophical thought of the late fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e.: the Hippocratic theory of humors; the Platonic philosophy of Eros, as well as his doctrine of the tripartite structure of the soul; and the Aristotelian psychology and physiology of passion.2 The works of the Hippocratic corpus do not specifically articulate a medical doctrine of lovesickness, but they lay a scientific foundation for its future development. The well-known humoral theory explains the working of the human organism in terms of the interaction between the four bodily liquids , or “humors”: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The harmonious balance among the four humors is a guarantee of health, both physical and mental, while the predominance of one of the humors can lead to a serious illness.3 While any of the humors, when produced in excess, can be detrimental to the human organism, only two of them are relevant to the future doctrine of lovesickness. Blood, believed to be especially active in the spring and possessing the qualities of warmth and moisture, is later interpreted as the humor responsible for erotic desire.4 By comparison, an overflow of black bile, associated in the Hippocratic writings with the fall and the qualities of 3 dryness and cold, produces symptoms typical of love suffering. Melancholy— a mental illness, resulting from the excess of this humor—was characterized in the later tradition by the desiccation of the body, general sadness, emaciation , and eventually madness. Medieval and Renaissance authors perceived lovesickness as either a variety of melancholy (termed “love-melancholy”) or a related but distinct illness.5 In the fourth century b.c.e., the medical doctrine of humors interacts with Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. In Plato’s Phaedrus, for example, the sublime love that arises from the contemplation of ideal beauty is accompanied by a concrete physical reaction easily translatable into the Hippocratic language of warmth and moisture.6 He who “beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty” experiences sweating, fever, warmth, painful irritation, and “a flood of particles.”7 These symptoms, commonly known as “the flood of passion,” Socrates explains to Phaedrus, in fact signify the growth of the soul’s wings. The encounter with true beauty, in Plato’s myth of anamnesis, reminds the soul of the experience of the absolute truth it was granted in its preexistent, winged state. The absence of the beautiful object, however, causes desiccation, sleeplessness, and even madness. Notably, Plato describes the soul’s suffering in terms of lovesickness : “All the rules of conduct, all the graces of life, of which aforetime she [the soul] was proud, she now disdains, welcoming a slave’s estate and any couch where she may be suffered to lie down close beside her darling, for besides her reverence for the possessor of beauty she has found in him the only physician for her grievous suffering.”8 It is Aristotle, however, who played a critical role in the development of the scientific theory of lovesickness.9 According to Aristotle, lovesickness develops when a pleasing object first affects one’s senses, above all the sight, and then the imaginative faculty where a visual image of the object is formed and preserved. This image eventually reaches the reason, to which it presents the actual object as extremely desirable. The desire to possess the object causes an overheating of blood around the heart, which changes the internal temperature throughout the body and eventually disturbs the individual ’s physiological and psychological balance.10 The physiological mechanism of the love malady offered by Aristotle proved to be extremely influential and long-lived. His theory, with some modifications, would be developed...

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