body, when there is a manifest redundance of bad humours, and melancholy
blood; and when these humours heat and boil, if this be not used in time,
the parties affected, so inflamed, are in great danger to be mad; but if it
be unadvisedly, importunely, immoderately used, it doth as much harm by
refrigerating the body, dulling the spirits, and consuming them: as Joh.
[1497]Curio in his 10th chapter well reprehends, such kind of letting blood
doth more hurt than good: [1498]"The humours rage much more than they did
before, and is so far from avoiding melancholy, that it increaseth it, and
weakeneth the sight." [1499]Prosper Calenus observes as much of all
phlebotomy, except they keep a very good diet after it; yea, and as
[1500]Leonartis Jacchinus speaks out of his own experience, [1501]"The
blood is much blacker to many men after their letting of blood than it was
at first." For this cause belike Salust. Salvinianus, _l. 2. c. 1_, will
admit or hear of no bloodletting at all in this disease, except it be
manifest it proceed from blood: he was (it appears) by his own words in
that place, master of an hospital of mad men, [1502]"and found by long
experience, that this kind of evacuation, either in head, arm, or any other
part, did more harm than good." To this opinion of his, [1503]Felix Plater
is quite opposite, "though some wink at, disallow and quite contradict all
phlebotomy in melancholy, yet by long experience I have found innumerable
so saved, after they had been twenty, nay, sixty times let blood, and to
live happily after it. It was an ordinary thing of old, in Galen's time, to
take at once from such men six pounds of blood, which now we dare scarce
take in ounces: _sed viderint medici_;" great books are written of this
subject.

Purging upward and downward, in abundance of bad humours omitted, may be
for the worst; so likewise as in the precedent, if overmuch, too frequent
or violent, it [1504]weakeneth their strength, saith Fuchsius, _l. 2.
sect., 2 c. 17_, or if they be strong or able to endure physic, yet it