In the Middle Ages, at a time of war and famine, the sick were subject to fear and exhaustion (apoplexy, hectic fever); but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period of relaxation of the feeling for one's country and of the obligations that such a feeling involves, egotism returned, and lust and gluttony became more wide spread (venereal diseases, congestion of the viscera and of the blood) in the eighteenth century, the search for pleasure was carried over into the imagination: one went to the theatre, read novels, and grew excited in vain conversations; one stayed up at night and slept during the day (hysteria, hypochondria, nervous diseases).