The strangest madness anybody had ever seen
The poor wretch imagined that he was all made of glass
"I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy,” Robert Burton explains in the preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy. Published in 1621 at a length of 900 pages, the encyclopedic volume no doubt ate up countless hours that might have otherwise found him succumbing to a dark mood. Subsequent editions only ballooned its size, adding hundreds more pages to the work.
The book, which draws heavily on the writings of ancient Greek physicians and then-contemporary sciences (both occult and otherwise), is not a medical text, strictly speaking. The author readily inserts himself into the work, speculating, expounding, and even joking about the subject matter.
In several passages, the book presents a laundry list of catalogued delusions, noting,
Fear of Devils, death, that they shall be so sick, of some such or such disease, ready to tremble at every object, they shall die themselves forthwith, or that some of their dear friends or near allies are certainly dead; imminent danger, loss, disgrace still torment others, &c., that they are all glass, and therefore will suffer no man to come near them; that they are all cork, as light as feathers; others as heavy as lead, some are afraid their heads will fall off their shoulders, that they have frogs in their bellies.
Eight years prior, between publication of the first and second parts of Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes’s "El licenciado Vidriera" ("The Lawyer of Glass"), was released. The short story tells the tale of a young man accidentally poisoned upon eating a laced quince fruit, who falls prey to one of the above delusions.
“He got better but remained possessed by the strangest madness anybody had ever seen,” Cervantes writes of the lawyer recovering after six months in bed. “The poor wretch imagined that he was all made of glass, and under this delusion, when someone came up to him, he would scream out in the most frightening manner, and using the most convincing arguments would beg them not to come near him, or they would break him; for really and truly he was not like other men, being made of glass from head to foot.”
It seems plausible that both writers drew inspiration from the same source. The best – and perhaps first – known case of the “glass delusion” arrived at the tail of the 14th century. In book VI of this sprawling autobiography, Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini documents the various mental ailments of France’s Charles VI, during whose reign the future Pope Pius II was born.
“His malady grew worse every day until his mind was completely gone,” the Pope explains. “Sometimes he thought he was made of glass and would not let himself be touched. He had iron rods put into his clothing and protected himself in all sorts of ways so that he might not fall and break.”
The precise cause of the Charles’ glass delusion remains a mystery. Contemporary reports regarded glass as a kind of magical substance. It was leading luxury item of the day, owing, in part, to its brittleness. In the decades prior, the king had established himself as “Charles the Beloved.” Though a robust, psychotic spells would find him in a far more fragile state.
Soon after his bout with psychosis in 1392, he earned a new name: “Charles the Mad.”
His condition manifested itself in various ways, from the murder of his own knights to half a year spent refusing to change his clothing or bathe. But it was the glass delusion that eventually became synonymous with the king. The condition arrived in waves, over the course of 56 spells. On good days, he maintained his penchant for engaging in outdoor activities. On bad, he spent mornings carefully wrapping his undersides in blankets, to avoid accidentally shattering on contact.
While, perhaps, first, Charles VI was from the only patient of the glass delusion during the so called “Golden Age of Melancholy.” Nor would he prove the only royal to suffer. Midway through the 19th century, the 23-year-old Princess Alexandra of Bavaria manifested her own unique version of the condition. Convinced she’d swallowed an entire grand piano made of glass some years before, she began walking gingerly, passing through doors sideways and generally avoiding contact, so as not to destroy the massive instrument inside her.
Numerous cases of the glass delusion were reported in the centuries between Charles and Alexandra. By her time, however, the condition had largely died out, save for a pair of uncorroborated cases in the century-and-a-half since. The world had seemingly moved on to other delusions and substances. The fragility of glass would be cast off for the strength of concrete after it emerged as a ubiquitous building material during the 19th century
Sources:
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Richard Burton
A History of Delusions by Victoria Shepherd
"El licenciado Vidriera" and the Glass Men of Early Modern Europe https://www.jstor.org/stable/3732644
The people who think they are made of glass https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32625632
The Delusion That Made Nobles Think Their Bodies Were Made of Glass https://www.history.com/news/the-delusion-that-made-nobles-think-their-bodies-were-made-of-glass
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