Did Aquinas really recommend sleep, a bath and a glass of wine for sorrow?

Two thirds of it is real. Aquinas names sleep and baths as remedies for sorrow. The wine was added by someone later. It appears nowhere in the text.

The version going around

"Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine." - attributed to Thomas Aquinas

The receipt

The real source is the Summa Theologiae, First Part of the Second Part, Question 38, Article 5, which asks, in the English Dominican translation, "Whether pain and sorrow are assuaged by sleep and baths?" His answer:

"Sorrow, by reason of its specific nature, is repugnant to the vital movement of the body; and consequently whatever restores the bodily nature to its due state of vital movement, is opposed to sorrow and assuages it." - Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, Q. 38, A. 5, English Dominican translation

Wine appears nowhere in Question 38. We checked every article of the question before publishing this page.

What he actually leans on

The article is built on Augustine remembering the death of his mother in the Confessions. Augustine writes that he had heard the bath got its name "from the fact of its driving sadness from the mind," and then: "I slept, and woke up again, and found my grief not a little assuaged." A saint citing another saint's grief, a bath, and a night of sleep. That part of the meme is real, and it is warmer than the meme.

The meme dropped the better remedies

Question 38 has five articles. Sleep and baths are only the last. In the same question Aquinas also argues that sorrow is eased by pleasure, by tears, by the sympathy of friends, and by contemplating truth. Someone compressed a five-part answer about being a bodied human into a nightcap.

The wine got attached because it scans. But two real remedies plus one invented is not a quote. It is a rewrite with a saint's name kept on for credibility.

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Lumoro sends one morning text a day: a verified quote, a plain reading of it, and one small thing to do. Every line gets checked against the original text before it reaches a phone, the same way this one was.