The Anatomy Of Melancholy Pdf

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TheAnatomy 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, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) is a book by Robert Burton, first published in 1621,[1] but republished five more times over the next seventeen years with massive alterations and expansions.

On its surface, the book is presented as a medical textbook in which Burton applies his vast and varied learning, in the scholastic manner, to the subject of melancholia (or clinical depression). Although presented as a medical text, The Anatomy of Melancholy is as much a sui generis (unique) work of literature as it is a scientific or philosophical text, as Burton covers far more than the titular subject. Anatomy uses melancholy as a lens through which all human emotion and thought may be scrutinized, and virtually the entire contents of a 17th-century library are marshalled into service of this goal.[2] It is encyclopedic in its range and reference.

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 forwardness 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 Stoic, 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.

Much of the book quotes[6] ancient and medieval 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 included a great deal of Latin poetry in the Anatomy, much of it from ancient sources left untranslated. Although his "citations" sound convincing, many are incorrect, taken out of context, or simply fabricated.[7]

The Anatomy of Melancholy is especially lengthy, the first edition being a single quarto volume nearly 900 pages long; subsequent editions were even longer.[8] The text has three major sections plus an introduction, 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, 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 manner of religious melancholies. The Anatomy concludes with an extensive index (which The New York Times Book Review called "a readerly pleasure in itself"[9]). Most modern editions add explanatory notes and translate most of the Latin.[2]

Admirers of The Anatomy of Melancholy range from Samuel Johnson,[10] Holbrook Jackson (whose Anatomy of Bibliomania [1930] was based on the style and presentation), George Armstrong Custer, Charles Lamb and John Keats (who said it was his favourite book) to Northrop Frye, Stanley Fish, Anthony Powell, Philip Pullman,[11] Cy Twombly, Jorge Luis Borges (who used a quote as an epigraph to his story "The Library of Babel"), O. Henry (William Sidney Porter), Amalia Lund, William Gass (who wrote the Introduction to the NYRB Classics 2001 reprint), Nick Cave, Samuel Beckett[12] and Jacques Barzun (who sees it anticipating 20th-century psychiatry).[13] According to The Guardian literary critic Nick Lezard, the Anatomy "survives among the cognoscenti".[14] Washington Irving quotes from it on the title page of The Sketch Book.

Burton's solemn tone and his endeavour to prove indisputable facts by weighty quotations were ridiculed by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy.[15][16] Sterne also mocked Burton's divisions in the titles of his chapters, and parodied his grave and sober account of Cicero's grief for the death of his daughter Tullia.[15]

Robert Burton was a scholar at the University of Oxford 400 years ago. He drew on the collections of the Bodleian Library and Christ Church, where he was himself Librarian, to seek to understand the human condition, in its full emotional range.

But his declared subject was 'melancholy'. The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, is an extraordinary and enormous attempt to grapple with the causes, symptoms, and treatments of that universal human experience.

With Burton as a guide, the series hears from leading experts in mental health research today, and from those who manage their struggles with sadness and depression in a variety of ways - including the gardener and broadcaster, Monty Don, pioneering cell biologist and author of Malignant Sadness: the anatomy of depression, Lewis Wolpert, and a young survivor from the Manchester Arena attack.

John Geddes and Amy Liptrot at Christ ChurchProfessor John Geddes, Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University, meets Amy at Christ Church Cathedral, beneath the bust of Burton, and speculates about the range of mood in The Anatomy. His own specialism in mood disorders and research into the use of wearables as a means of monitoring and managing mood has special relevance in the context of Burton who himself suffered from depression and mood instability.

Robert Burton talks about his own struggles with melancholy and reveals a personal vulnerability when he says: 'I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.' The series explores the potential of writing and reading to give purpose, better understand one's experiences and connect with others. Perhaps there has never been a better moment to pause and reflect on melancholy: ways to understand it, alleviate it and accept it.

Burton was a deeply literary man who wanted to show how the words of others had described the melancholy aspects of the human predicament. As he warns in his book-length preamble, Democritus Junior to the Reader:

Noga Arikha is a historian of ideas who endeavours to bridge the divide between sciences and the arts & humanities, especially with regard to our minds and bodies. She was raised an anglophone in Paris, and lived in London and New York before returning in 2011 to her native city, where she is Chair of Critical Studies at Paris College of Art. She told the story of how humoural theory sustained medicine and psychology for 2500 years in her Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007), a Washington Post best book of 2007. She has also co-authored with her husband Marcello Simonetta Napoleon and the Rebel: A Story of Brotherhood, Passion, and Power (Palgrave, 2011). She received a PhD from the Warburg Institute in 2001, was a Fellow at the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies at Columbia University, and has taught at Bard College and at the Bard Graduate Center, NY. Her website: www.nogaarikha.com.

The Public Domain Review is registered in the UK as a Community Interest Company (#11386184), a category of company which exists primarily to benefit a community or with a view to pursuing a social purpose, with all profits having to be used for this purpose.

Because melancholy corrupts the imagination, those who are afflicted with the condition are especially impressionable. Burton gathers a whole series of stories about the remarkable effects of the mind on the body, including

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Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) can hardly be thought of as a modern study in psychiatry, but it contains more elements of modern theory than have been recognized. Attempts to recommend the book to modern readers have missed the point that Burton, more clearly than other seventeenth century writers on melancholy, sees traumatic loss of attachment figures, status symbols and personal health as predisposing to mood disorders. In this he strongly anticipates such work as that of John Bowlby in Attachment and Loss (1969), 1973). Burton's theory is divided between the humoural physiological theory descending from Galen and the observation that loss is a frequent precursor of melancholy. He cannot reconcile the two, writing a book only poised on the verge of modernity. The Anatomy of Melancholy nevertheless very fully discusses etiological "hunches" which have found verification in recent studies of traumatic loss.

The Anatomy of Melancholy is the vast and only work by Robert Burton, the seventeenth-century English priest and scholar. It 'opens and cuts up' the condition of melancholy, or depression, as we know it today, and in doing so explores a dizzying range of additional topics, including goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, alcohol and kissing. Burton believed that reading was a cure for melancholy, and so the book itself - one of the most unique and uncategorizable works of all time - can be seen as a tonic for the very condition it describes.

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