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Glass delusion is an external manifestation of a Mental disorder recorded in Europe mainly in the late Middle Ages and early modern period (15th to 17th centuries). People feared that they were made of glass "and therefore likely to shatter into pieces".
Concentration of the glass delusion among the wealthy and educated classes allowed modern scholars to associate it with a wider and better described disorder of Melancholia.Speak, "El licenciado...", p.850
Miguel de Cervantes based one of his short Exemplary Novels, The Glass Graduate (, 1613), on the delusion of the title subject, an aspiring young lawyer. The protagonist of the story falls into a grave depression after being bedridden for six months subsequent to being poisoned with a purportedly aphrodisiac potion. He claims that, being of glass, his perceptions are clearer than those of men of flesh and demonstrates by offering witty comments. After two years of illness, Rodaja is cured by a monk; no details of the cure are provided except that the monk is allegedly a miracle-maker.
The Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens wrote a Costly Folly (1622) centered on a subject who "fears everything that moves in his vicinity... the chair will be the death for him; he trembles at the bed, fearful that one will break his bum, the other smash his head". His Dutch contemporary Caspar Barlaeus experienced the glass delusion.F.F. Blok, Caspar Barlaeus: from the correspondence of a melancholic; translated, Assen: Van Gorcum, 1976
French philosopher René Descartes wrote Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), using the glass delusion as an example of an Insanity person whose perceived knowledge of the world differs from the majority. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book II, Chapter XI, 13) when proposing his celebrated model of madness, John Locke also refers to the glass delusion.Locke J (1690) An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. London: Thomas Bassett, p71.
In modern times, the glass delusion has not completely disappeared, and there are still isolated cases today. "Surveys of modern psychiatric institutions have only revealed two specific (uncorroborated) cases of the glass delusion. Foulché-Delbosc reports finding one Glass Man in a Paris asylum, and a woman who thought she was a potsherd was recorded at an asylum in Merenberg." Andy Lameijn, a psychiatrist from the Netherlands, reports that he has a male patient suffering from the delusion in Leiden.
German alchemist Johann Joachim Becher had a fascination with glass delusion. In Physica Subterranea]] (1669), he wrote that he discovered a way of turning dead human bodies into glass. However, Becher's claim was not true.
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