ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Disability, Melancholy, and Mental Health in Early Modern Italy

• In Event: Early Modern Medicine 1

English Abstract

In January of 1554, Fra Girolamo di Giorgio Calzolaio wrote to the Florentine Magistrato dei Pupilli, or the Court of Wards, regarding his melancholic brother, Stefano. As Girolamo had taken a vow of poverty and could not oversee his brother’s care, he requested to have Stefano placed under the Magistrato dei Pupilli so that he could receive care at the Hospital of San Paolo. Throughout the early modern period, melancholic individuals like Stefano were placed into hospitals, lost the right to control their own property, and were imprisoned as a consequence of their perceived humoral imbalance. While early modern philosophers often romanticized melancholy as producing genius, those suffering from excessive black bile and their families often reported on the disabling potential of melancholia with no reference to the glorified impact that such a humor might have on one’s intelligence. The consequences of melancholic humors could result in a reduction of individual rights and independence, but it also permitted a degree of legal forgiveness in cases where delusions resulted in criminal activity. This paper engages with the medical treatment of people with disabilities, the scientific understandings of what made their bodies function differently, and the societal impacts of these people and their minds. Through the study of diary accounts, court cases, and hospital records, this paper studies how early modern physicians and legal theorists imagined and described mental disability through the lens of a corrupt body as a whole.

Author

• Jessica Hogbin, Syracuse University