The Anatomy of Melancholy

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Front page of The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Anatomy of Melancholy (Full title The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up.) is a book by Robert Burton, first published in 1621.

On its surface, the book is a medical textbook in which Burton applies his large and varied learning in the scholastic manner to the subject of melancholia (which includes what is now termed clinical depression). Burton defined his subject as follows:

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or in habit. In disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality. . . . This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed.

Burton drew from nearly every science of his day, including psychology and physiology, but also astronomy, meteorology, and theology, and even astrology and demonology.

Much of the book consists of quotations from various ancient and mediæval medical authorities, beginning with Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen. Hence the Anatomy is filled with more or less pertinent references to the works of others. A competent Latinist, Burton also included a great deal of Latin poetry in the Anatomy, and many of his inclusions from ancient sources are left untranslated in the text.

The Anatomy of Melancholy is an especially lengthy book, the first edition being a single quarto volume nearly 900 pages long; subsequent editions were even longer. The text is divided into three major sections plus an introduction, the whole written in Burton's sprawling style. Characteristically, the introduction includes not only an author's note (titled "Democritus Junior to the Reader"), but also a Latin poem ("Democritus Junior to His Book"), a warning to "The Reader Who Employs His Leisure Ill", an abstract of the following text, and another poem explaining the frontispiece. The following three sections proceed in a similarly exhaustive fashion: the first section focuses on the causes and symptoms of "common" melancholies, while the second section deals with cures for melancholy, and the third section explores more complex and esoteric melancholies, including the melancholy of lovers and all varieties of religious melancholies. The Anatomy concludes with an extensive index (which, many years later, The New York Times Book Review called "a readerly pleasure in itself"^[1]). Most modern editions include many explanatory notes. Throughout the book, Burton's digressive and inclusive style, often verging on a stream of consciousness, consistently informs and animates the text. Nominally a medical text, the Anatomy is "vitalized by (Burton's) pervading humour"^[2] and is as much a sui generis work of literature as it is a scientific or philosophical text.

Admirers of The Anatomy of Melancholy range from Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Charles Lamb, and John Keats (who claimed it to be his favourite book), to Stanley Fish, Philip Pullman, Jorge Luis Borges (who used a quote as an epigraph to his story "The Library of Babel"), and Jacques Barzun (who sees in it many anticipations of 20th century psychiatry). The Anatomy is still considered an enduring, if eccentric, literary classic by many modern critics. ^[3]

[edit] Editions and Availability

An obsessive rewriter of his work, Burton published five revised and expanded editions of The Anatomy of Melancholy until his death in 1640. The Anatomy of Melancholy has often been out of print, most notably between 1676 and 1800.^[4] Because no original manuscript of the Anatomy has survived, later reprints have drawn more or less faithfully from the editions published during Burton's life.^[5] Early editions of the Anatomy are now in the public domain, with several available in their entirety from a number of online sources such as Project Gutenberg. In recent years, increased interest in the book, combined with its status as a public domain work, has resulted in a number of new print editions, most recently a 2001 reprinting by The New York Review of Books under its NYRB Classics imprint (ISBN 0-940322-66-8).

[edit] References

^ Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review, October 3, 1991
^ Émile Legouis, A History of English Literature (1926)
^ Nick Lezard, "Classics of the Future," The Guardian, September 16, 2000.
^ The Complete Review discussion of The Anatomy of Melancholy
^ William H. Gass, Introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy, New York Review of Books 2001 ISBN 0-940322-66-8