The case history of melancholy recounted in the medical observations of the German writer Johann Schenck (1530/1–98) is a classic example of how much small physical changes can affect both the body and the mind. His young patient did not empty his bowels for so long that he became constipated (or ‘costive’), perhaps because he was working at a fair where he was unable to find anywhere to relieve himself. This disruption to the normal flow of his body made its effects felt, not only within his body, but also in his thought processes: he became so delirious that (as Schenck notes) he hardly knew himself. While his friends thought he was the victim of a magic potion, his physician recognised that his delusion was a symptom of melancholy and treated it with an enema.