Robert Burton

as a man desperately swimming drowns him that comes to help him, by suretyship and borrowing they will willingly undo all their associates and allies […].

Melancholy, cold and dry, thick, black, and sour, […] is a bridle to the other two hot humours, blood and choler, preserving them in the blood, and nourishing the bones.

they […] still think their melancholy to be most grievous, none so bad as they are, though it be nothing in respect […].

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Phlebotomy, many times neglected, may do much harm to the body, when there is a manifest redundance of bad humours and melancholy blood […]

As it is acceptable and conducing to most, so especially to a melancholy man […]

I would for these causes wish him that is melancholy […] to impose some task upon himself, to divert his melancholy thoughts: to study the art of memory […] , or practise brachygraphy, etc., that will ask a great deal of attention […]

Jacchinus […] instanceth in a patient of his, that married a young wife in a hot summer, “and so dried himself with chamber-work, that he became in short space, from melancholy, mad”: he cured him by moistening remedies.

Gordonius […] confirms as much, putting the “matter of melancholy sometimes in the stomach, liver, heart, brain, spleen, myrach, hypochondries, whenas the melancholy humour resides there, or the liver is not well cleansed from melancholy blood.”

Ptolemæus in his Centiloquy, Hermes, or whosoever else the author of that Tract, attributes all these symptoms, which are in melancholy men, to celestial influences