Tales of a fractured mind
The casebooks of Renaissance physicians contain many strange stories of melancholy, and few stranger than the case of the Italian gentleman who could not urinate. The 16th-century writer Andre du Laurens, physician to King Henri IV of France, records what happened: the patient told his doctors that he would rather die than go to the toilet because, if he relieved himself, he would drown his home city of Siena.
At first the patient’s physicians tried to reason with him. They pointed out that the cubic capacity of his bladder was hardly equal to the task of submerging a whole city. Even 10,000 people, they said, would not be able to flood a single house. But the gentleman would not be convinced.
Seeing that his life was now in danger, the doctors hit on a novel treatment – if an extreme one. Rather than trying to persuade him through logic, instead they entered into his delusory state. They started a fire in the house next door and triggered Siena’s fire alarm system – the ringing of church bells. The servants became bit-part actors in the drama, shouting out: “To the fire, to the fire!” Then the civic worthies came to visit the patient. They pleaded with him for help: there was only one way to save the
