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Witches, vampires and werewolves were all part of the rich imagination of European society in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This early modern period was arguably the greatest age of the imagination and with it came ‘imaginary' diseases and ‘diseases of the imagination'.

Intellectual historian Yasmin Haskell, who holds the Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism, has recently edited and published a book about it: Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Diseases in the Early Modern Period. Professor Haskell has brought together social and literary historians from several different European cultures to examine psychosomatic illnesses, deeply-held beliefs that imagination could influence physical events, and scholarly debate over witches, vampires and werewolves.

"My interest was sparked when I was looking at two very long Latin poems written by Jesuits in the 17th century," Professor Haskell said. "The poems were about chocolate and fishing but they both had lengthy digressions on a plague of hypochondria that was apparently afflicting people who were well educated.

"‘Hypochondria' was recognised as a real illness then, or rather, ‘hypochondriacal melancholy', an illness with physical and psychological symptoms which physicians of the time believed arose from disorders of the organs lying ‘beneath the cartilage of the ribs' (the literal meaning of ‘hypochondria').

"Both the poets talked about it as a depressive illness from which they had suffered, an illness that could eventually lead to complete derangement."

Professor Haskell, who is a chief investigator in the AR C Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, secured an AR C grant, with Winthrop Professor Sergio Starkstein, from the School of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, to look at the history of psychosomatic and somatoform illnesses.

"Nowadays, if we think somebody is imagining that they are sick, we say they have hypochondria, but in the early modern period (from about the late Is your illness all in your mind? 16th century to the early 18th century) hypochondriac illness would have been treated seriously by doctors - with drugs, dietary prescriptions and so on."

Along with that belief was serious and learned discussion about whether witches really ‘flew to the Sabbath' and whether the devil could impersonate the dead, perhaps even create the illusion of vampires. Or did such creatures really exist?

"They were all very vexed issues; it was a frightening time," Professor Haskell said. "It was believed that if you suffered from melancholy (black bile), it allowed demons to enter your body. On the other hand, melancholy was seen in some quarters as a precondition for genius: people who achieved in the arts were often presumed to be suffering from melancholy.

"And even today, some people talk about links between bipolar and artistic genius."

Professor Haskell said people in the early modern period believed the imagination was so powerful that it could influence others from afar. "They believed you could make somebody sick with the power of your mind. Such effects might even be produced from beyond the grave.

"Today we have our own worries about potential ‘diseases of the imagination' as a result of online pornography, violent computer games, bombardment with multimedia advertising and the 24-hour news cycle. Are we becoming more distractible, desensitised, depressed ... as a result of our sedentary and screen-centred modern lives?" Professor Haskell asked.

"If the views of the early modern physicians and theologians seem strange to us, we should at least give those guys credit for thinking seriously and with considerable sophistication about the mechanisms by which images and ideas can influence us.

"And if you look at the modern-day ‘bibles' of psychiatry such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, it is difficult not to conclude that we haven't come so far, at least where conceptual issues are concerned. We find in many cases a sort of checklist for practitioners to help them diagnose mental illnesses: along the lines of, if you have five or six of these beliefs or behaviours, then you have this particular disease.

"Funnily enough, many of the nonpharmacological treatments used by modern psychiatrists and psychologists - from cognitive behaviour therapy through to an emphasis on diet, exercise, and social interactions - have very ancient roots."

Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Diseases in the Early Modern Period is published by Brepols in Belgium.

Published in UWA News , 11June 2012