Lupine Melancholy

The medical sciences reinforced the idea that the Devil, invoked by witches, sorcerers, and magicians, was responsible for werewolf metamorphoses, real or illusory, by explaining the phenomenon as a disease, through Hippocratic and Galenic theories. I have already cited the most obvious example of the physician, Johann Weyer, who in his De praestigiis daemonum explained that werewolves suffered from a particular kind of melancholy, known as chatrab by the Arab physicians and lycanthropy by the Greeks, based on the notions of the ancient physician, Marcellus. He took his description of lycanthropy from the Canon of Avicenna, whose ideas I will refer to further ahead, and emphatically declared that it was a