Jacques Ferrand

Life & Legacy

Jacques Ferrand was a French physician born around 1575 in Agen, France. He is famous for his treatise on melancholia, Traicte de l'essence et guerison de l'amour ou de la melancholie erotique (1610), an early psychological work on melancholia. It was for this work he was put on trial for by the Inquisition.
The treatise on erotic melancholia may have been read by the French writer, Eugène Sue, whose character "Jacques Ferrand" ["Mysteries of Paris"], actually dies from an unrequited passion. Sue's father had been a distinguished doctor, and Sue himself was engaged in the medical profession when he was a young man.
In 1623, Ferrand wrote a book about the uses of bloodletting to cure "heartbreak" and "heartsickness" (figurative). He posited that the person being cured of heartbreak should be bled almost to the point of literal heart failure and should be plump and in good health beforehand.