Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy 1.2.2:
“In the first rank of these, I may well reckon up costiveness, and keeping in of our ordinary excrements, which as it often causeth other diseases, so this of melancholy in particular. Celsus, lib. 1. cap. 3, saith, It produceth inflammation of the head, dullness, cloudiness, headache,
&c. Prosper Calenus, lib. de atra bile, will have it distemper not the organ only, but the mind itself by troubling of it:
and sometimes it is a sole cause of madness, as you may read in the first book of Skenkius’s Medicinal Observations. A young merchant going to Nordeling fair in Germany, for ten days’ space never went to stool; at his return he was grievously melancholy, thinking that he was robbed, and would not be persuaded but that all his money was gone; his friends thought he had some philtrum given him, but Cnelius, a physician, being sent for, found his costiveness alone to be the cause, and thereupon gave him a clyster, by which he was speedily recovered.”
