This Sunday afternoon, John and I attended the doctor’s lecture on Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Mental Illness. I found it most interesting. Here are the major points that he 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 Don Quixote. He describes him as choleric and melancholic, a description that introduces the first approach in character diagnosis.

During the Renaissance, several thinkers, for instance Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), believed that melancholia gave the power of life required in all the creative processes, but 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.

Don Quixote, after fighting with the White Moon Knight in Barcelona, which is another allusion to melancholy by the author, comes back home defeated, and there his friends, the priest and the barber, with a moral based treatment, were able to listen to reason. The moral treatment was a therapy based on humanitarian treatment which avoided any repressive measures.

He suggested that the lanky asthenic and to a lesser degree the athletic 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.

Because other authors consider Don Quixote to be alienated, strange, conventional, more literary than scientific, a cultural event or a cultural icon, a literary resource, all of this allowed Cervantes to talk freely through Don Quixote without any difficulty.

In chapter six of Part I of Don Quixote, the priest and the barber conduct a scrutiny of the books in Don Quixote's library in a vain attempt to expurgate the malady of the chivalresque. But not all the books end up on the fire. Among those that are spared is the 1511 Castilian translation of Martorell's Catalan romance Tirant lo blanc. This book is praised both for its style, and for its down-to-earth treatment of the lives of its heroes: To find a book praised because its characters eat, sleep and die testate in their beds is rather odd when one comes to consider Don Quixote itself.

It is true that Quixote also dies in bed, and not before he has made a will. But even a cursory reading of the novel shows that for 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 this talk is to raise a number of questions which arise from the treatment of food in Don Quixote. 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.

All of these factors are relevant to our consideration of the relationship between Don Quixote's physical and mental state and his diet. For Quixote is presented to the reader as, above all, a sick man, a man who is physically infirm and mentally unstable, and a man whose infirmity and instability are related to specific aspects of his life-style, principally the excessive reading of books, lack of sleep and a poor diet. 


His diet would have left Don Quixote seriously deficient in energy; his calorie intake is only about a quarter of that required by a 50-year-old male with even a sedentary lifestyle. The consequences of long-term malnourishment of this order would be wasting of the flesh and loss of muscle tone. Secondly, he is below the recommended daily amount of all nutrients, but is especially deficient in calcium and vitamins.

The calcium deficiency would also account for the poor state of his teeth, frequently commented on in the novel. Lacking vitamins, could cause him to have a disease that causes weakness, slow healing of wounds, and extreme soreness of the gums and joints, loss of muscle coordination, and vision problems.

I am suggesting is that Cervantes has 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. Only during the episode of the Cave of Montesinos does Quixote seem at all aware of the relationship between the physical and mental strain he has been under, and he asks for something to eat.

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.

Part II begins, as does Part I, with an immediate mention of the state of Don Quixote's diet. 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, and the barber's ensuing tale about the madman of Seville underlines the lesson.

Although Don Quixote enjoys considerable celebrity in Part II, he conspicuously fails to benefit from the hospitality he might have expected. It is true that he spends a lot more time as the guest of the well-heeled, especially with the Duke and Duchess, but there are still many occasions when opportunities to eat are passed over. In fact, Camacho's wedding feast is one of the rare occasions when Sancho's inability to turn down a free meal causes him to take sides against his master. Don Quixote is captivated by Quiteria's and Basilio's romantic escape from an arranged marriage, but Sancho finds more to appreciate in the jilted Camacho's catering arrangements. When Don Quixote decides to leave before the guests start to tuck into the buffet, Sancho is left bewailing one of many lost opportunities to satisfy his gluttony while having to make do with a spoonful of broth.

In the discussion so far, one of the main themes has been 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. This is not surprising since Don Quixote shares at least some of the features of the picaresque, a genre pioneered in Spain and dominated by the theme of hunger and its destructive effect on the moral fibre of societies and individuals alike. They prompt the thought that 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 cowheel.

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, 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.