The Down and Out King - 13

EMILY

Pea soup and fat what are you at

We have been to the court house,

And by and by it is no lie

We’ll all go in the workhouse,

It is very sad, they must be mad

Besides they must be hardned

For to impose and bite the nose

Of the Lambeth bucksome guardians.

This Sunday afternoon, John and I attended the doctor’s lecture on Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Mental Illness. I found it most interesting.

It was held at the Literary Institution, which is part of the Calne Savings Bank on Church Street. I found out that it was promoted by Rev. Guthrie, who was the vicar here before John Duncan, and it is
his wife who opened the school for the training of female servants. I must get in contact with her to discuss whether our girls might make use of their school.

The talk was fairly well attended, with about 40 persons in the room, and I noticed that the John Corbett Duncans were there and smiled and waved to them.

I took notes and here are the major points that the doctor made.

Was Don Quixote mad?

In the opinion of Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) Don Quixote was the best treatise from which to learn about medicine. In the history of medicine since the 18th century, and especially when psychiatry appeared as a speciality, different mental-health theories have been projected onto Don Quixote as though he were indeed a medical patient.

For instance, in Spain the first doctor who wrote a clinical history about Don Quixote’s illness was Antonio Hernández Morejón, an historian and surgeon belonging to the Colegio San Carlos in Madrid. In his work in 1836 he presents a complete clinical history of DonQuixote. He describes him as choleric and melancholic, a description that introduces the first approach in character diagnosis. In the time when Don Quixote was written, melancholia was considered a stigma.

Several factors could have produced cholera and melancholy in Don Quixote - diet, insomnia and his compulsive addiction to reading chivalry books. He falls into illness and helpless physical disability.

The sudden changes in Don Quixote begin when he wants nothing to do with his property and he compulsively devotes himself to reading chivalry books. The physical condition of the body are considered in terms of their effect on the passions and emotions, and the passions are important because of the misery they cause when they overrule reason.

In the17th century melancholia was defined in terms of a “weak nervous system”. Also, having established circularity, this implied that the disease of the soul could originate in the nervous system and, in turn, the melancholic state could be as a consequence of psychic suffering.

All the above introduces the neuropsychological approach. In the psychiatric treatises of the 19th century are allusions to Quixote as a model of symptoms for a new term in clinical assessment -
monomania.

Don Quixote, after fighting with the White Moon Knight in Barcelona, comes back home defeated, and there, with his friends, the priest and the barber, was able to listen to reason. Hernandez Morejón, prescribes a moral treatment for Don Quixote based on humanitarian treatment which avoided any repressive measures.

He suggested that the lanky asthenic types were more prone to schizophrenia, while the pyknic (short and fat) types were more likely to develop maniac-depressive disorders. His work was
criticised because his thinner, schizophrenic patients were younger than his pyknic, manic-depressive subjects, so the differences in body type could be explained by differences in age.

Nevertheless, Kretschmer’s ideas to some extent entered into popular culture and
generated further psychological research.

In summary, the Don Quixote’s biotypology predisposes him to madness, the constant repression of libido is the cause of his pathology, and lastly, the compulsive reading of chivalry books lead him to manifest the illness.

When Don Quixote was written, in the beginnings of 17th century, the Hippocratic theory of the Four Humours, take up again by Galeno, was the prevailing medical paradigm.

Most of the time Don Quixote sleeps little and eats less. Even before he embarks on his chivalric career, the run-down and neglected character of his estate and household is reflected in the miserable diet he has to endure Don Quixote's diet is frugal, monotonous and unappetising, and it is hardly surprising that with such meagre fare Don Quixote is as thin as he is always
portrayed. But Quixote's bad habits are not limited to diet. He also neglects his sleep.

Here we have the classic syndrome of the single male: the fatal combination of late nights and poor food. Most men go through this stage at some point in their lives, and most men grow out of it. But
Don Quixote never does, and eventually he makes himself so ill that his brain dries up and he starts to lose his wits. Cervantes did not need to be a qualified doctor to recognise the symptoms of sleep
deprivation and malnutrition, or to know what the combined effect would be on his hero's behaviour in the novel. Not the least important aspect of this fascinating and complex field is the dark side, the many ways in which diet implies hunger or starvation, from the psychology of anorexia to the politics of famine. The purpose of the talk was to raise a number of questions, in particular, the significance of both malnutrition and hunger in the formation of Don Quixote's character

Variety is just as important to a good diet as nutritional balance, and, given that few people any longer go out and catch their food, variety is provided by the movement of goods through trade.

Six products which have profoundly influenced British taste - tea, coffee, tobacco, chocolate, sugar and potatoes.

Of all the aspects of this field considered so far, the intersection of the physical and the mental is the least well understood and the most fascinating. Physical size and shape often appear to correlate with personality: the fact that Don Quixote, for example, is thin and Sancho Panza is fat is not accidental; it is part of Cervantes's design, because those shapes are among the vocabulary of signifiers which most languages and cultures have in common.

The speaker suggested that Cervantes constructed a credible continuum between Don Quixote's social and economic status, his lifestyle, diet, physical health and mental condition, and that all these factors combine to produce patterns of behaviour which are convincing and consistent. What is more, Cervantes must sustain this continuum if Don Quixote is to retain his essential character once he leaves behind his sedentary habits and hits the road as a knight errant.

Don Quixote might have expected his diet to improve once he embarked on his new career. All those banquets he read about in novels of chivalry would have been as powerful an incentive for a knight-errant as the opportunity to right wrongs and do good. In fact things get much, much worse. Indeed, Cervantes appears to do his best to ensure that Don Quixote eats as little as possible. On his first
evening he arrives at the inn which he mistakes for a castle, and the innkeeper brings food but he cannot eat it because he cannot take off his helmet. And the same goes for drinking, which he can only manage when the landlord finds him a straw. Not surprisingly, this failure to eat a decent supper is immediately followed by one of the early exhibitions of Don Quixote's chivalric eccentricity, as he proceeds to sit up all night keeping vigil over his armour, prior to his investiture as a knight.

In this episode Cervantes shows that he intends to keep Don Quixote tired and hungry for as long as possible, a strategy which is assisted in the second sally by the convenient theft of Sancho's ass,
along with the saddlebags containing their supplies for the journey. The resulting loss of both food and drink ensure constant hunger, which induces the lightheadedness and hallucinations characteristic of Quixote's response to the world. Unlike Sancho, however, Don Quixote rarely complains about hunger; indeed, for the most part he seems completely oblivious to it and, as we shall see, on occasions seems rather pleased with his ability to do without food.

Cervantes subjects Sancho to the same regime, although Sancho is much more prone to complain. He suffers almost systematic starvation during his governorship of the island, perhaps the episode in the novel in which the squire comes closest to emulating the wayward brilliance of his master. Soon after the beginning of his tenure of office Sancho is shown into a palatial dining room and invited to sit at a table laden with many sumptuous dishes. But they are each promptly whisked away from him by a doctor who decries the ill effects of all types of food, especially partridges.

That Cervantes understood the relationship between hunger and hallucination is clear from the cases where the contrary is shown to be true. Don Quixote does have his moments of lucidity, and not
surprisingly they follow the rare opportunities he has to eat. If his meagre rations in chapter 1 of Part I had brought him to the verge of insanity, in the opening chapter of Part II, he has been nursed back
almost to the brink of sanity. The priest and the barber had left instructions to his household to feed him. The regime appears to have brought some benefits but he hardly looks the picture of health, sitting up in bed in a green vest and red knitted cap. His fragile grip on the real world is soon broken when the priest decides to test his sanity to destruction by leading him on to the subject of chivalry.

One of the main themes of the talk was hunger, or denial of food, rather than the satisfaction of hunger. Sometimes the food is there, but Don Quixote is prevented from getting at it; at other times, the food is simply not there, or is so poor, so frugal or so inedible that virtual starvation is the result. If people are what they eat, and there is nothing for them to eat, how can they be expected to
make anything of their lives?

In chapter 59 of Part II, Don Quixote and Sancho fetch up at an inn in search of supper. The landlord invites them to order anything they wish Not wishing to appear greedy, Sancho takes him at his word and orders up a couple of roast chickens. Sancho runs through a whole range of dishes - chicken, veal, kid, bacon, eggs - but all of them are off. Either the chickens have been eaten by predators, or the pullets have been sent to market, or they are fresh out of veal (but there'll be plenty next week), and of course there aren't any eggs because there aren't any hens. In the end, Sancho has to settle for cow heel.

Something could be said of Don Quixote and his value systems; he is not hungry, he is merely 'delicado'. Beaten, starved and deprived of sleep, he enters a world of the imagination in which physical impediments become less and less important. As a result, he is able to draw strength from abstinence. When Sancho can find nothing better than bread, cheese and an onion in his saddlebag, Don Quixote reassures him that it doesn’t matter. Later, as he is about to embark on his
penitence in the sierra, Sancho asks him what he is going to do for food. 'The vocation of knight errant is essentially an ascetic calling and, in its context, privation is a virtue.'

“In summary,” he said, “I wish to put forward the view that despite the possible predisposition to his sort of mental imbalance, the lack of proper diet contributed greatly to his mental state.”

My husband John was fascinated by the architecture of the building more than by the talk, I think. He says it is a late classical ashlar-faced building, and was erected in 1840. All I can say about
the building is that it could have done with more heating, as, however much I enjoyed it, I was very cold by the end of the very long lecture.