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Darrera modificació: 2022-12-07
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat, Arnau
Ile, Vlad-Lucian, "Is melancholy contagious? Interplays between the medieval notions of melancholy and lovesickness", Hermeneia, 29 (2022), 20-36.
- Resum
- During the Latin Middle Ages, the melancholic state was described as a complex phenomenon that had both external and internal causes. Implying a set of concepts from the domains of natural philosophy, medicine, astronomy and even theology, it was seen as an affection of both the body and soul of the human being. Often enough, the main framework for explaining the affection of melancholy was confined to an internal system of corporal humoral imbalances, in which the black bile played the central role. Accordingly, the transmission of melancholy understood as illness from one individual to another, or its contagiousness, was almost an undiscussed problem. However, at the foundation of the modern concept of contagiousness lays the medieval concept of action and contact used in the etiological descriptions of different medieval illnesses. Melancholy (melancholia) and especially lovesickness (amor heroes), were two paralleling affections, often overlapping, which sometimes addressed the problem of their causes and manifestation in those terms. Focusing mainly on Constantinus Africanus' Viaticum and on Avicenna's Canon of medicine, this paper proposes to explore the conceptual interplay between melancholy and lovesickness, in order to establish the degree in which melancholy, through lovesickness, can be considered a contagious disease.
- Matèries
- Medicina - Psicologia i psiquiatria
- URL
- http://hermeneia.ro/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/02_I ...
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