Love is a Sickness

LOVE is a sickness full of woes,
All remedies refusing;
A plant that with most cutting grows,
Most barren with best using.
Why so?

More we enjoy it, more it dies;
If not enjoy'd, it sighing cries—
Heigh ho!

Love is a torment of the mind,
A tempest everlasting;
And Jove hath made it of a kind
Not well, nor full nor fasting.
Why so?

More we enjoy it, more it dies;
If not enjoy'd, it sighing cries—
Heigh ho!
Samuel Daniel. 1562–1619

I wish I could post the song instead of the poem, because it is a song more than a poem for me, (I used to sing it), which portrays very well the perception of love as a sickness, but of the mind, on which a lot of Medieval scholars wrote treatises. They were trying to provide an analysis of its symptoms and suggest cures. And when they were calling it a sickness, they were not speaking metaphorically, No!; they were speaking of a sickness, just like any other sicknesses. For your enjoyment: "Questions on the Viaticum". The seriousness of their preoccupation and their explanations seem mostly funny from the point of view of our knowledge of medicine and human sciences. But I can't keep myself from asking: have we arrived at a better understanding? Have we moved any closer in explaining this feeling (or syndrome, depends on how you approach it)? Or, rather, have we gave up the effort of trying to give an account of it and left the concept (and the thing itself, I don't know what it is, this_thing_called_love) to be exhausted by the consumerism of advertisements and horoscopes? And, lastly, will there be an end to my rhetorical questions? And, loss of words, I sigh!