The Anatomy of Melancholy

Summary

The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers. Burton writes as Democritus Junior, heir to the laughing philosopher of Abdera, who in Hippocrates' legendary letter was found dissecting animals to discover the seat of black bile. The long preface, Democritus Junior to the Reader, explains that he writes of melancholy to avoid melancholy, confesses that Saturn ruled his birth, apologises for an unpolished book licked into shape like a bear's cub, and argues that the whole world is mad: kingdoms, professions, lovers and scholars alike. It ends with a sketch of his own utopia. The First Partition defines melancholy, following ancient and Renaissance physicians, as a kind of dotage without fever, accompanied by fear and sadness without apparent cause, and distinguishes passing melancholy dispositions, which are the common lot of mortals, from the settled disease. A digression of anatomy explains humours, spirits and faculties. Burton then catalogues causes: God and devils, witches and stars, old age, heredity, bad diet, retention and evacuation, bad air, too much or too little exercise, solitariness and idleness, sleeplessness, the passions of sorrow, fear, shame, envy, ambition and avarice, and overmuch study, with a famous digression on the misery of scholars. Symptoms of body and mind follow, including delusions of being made of glass or butter, and prognostics end with the problem of suicide. The Second Partition turns to cure. Unlawful remedies from magicians are rejected; lawful ones come from God, the physician and the patient's cooperation. Burton reviews the six non-natural things of Galenic medicine (diet, air, exercise, sleep, evacuation and the passions), with a soaring digression on the air that ranges across cosmology and geography, and recommends music, mirth, friendship and study. A long Consolatory Digression answers every discontent from poverty to death. Pharmacy follows, from borage and hellebore to bloodletting, opiates for sleep and the ambivalent praise of tobacco. The Third Partition treats love-melancholy, its causes, symptoms and cures, then jealousy, and finally religious melancholy, from superstition to despair, closing with the precept that sums up the whole: be not solitary, be not idle. Burton revised the book through six editions, expanding it from about 350,000 to more than half a million words.

Plot or Argument

• Democritus Junior to the Reader

  A satirical preface of over a hundred pages: Burton's pseudonym and reasons for writing, his confession of melancholy, a survey of universal madness in every estate and nation, and a utopian commonwealth of his own devising.

• First Partition, Sections 1–2: definition and causes

  Diseases in general, a digression of anatomy, the definition and kinds of melancholy (head, whole-body and hypochondriacal), and an exhaustive survey of causes supernatural, natural, dietary, environmental, emotional and intellectual, including the digression on the misery of scholars.

• First Partition, Sections 3–4: symptoms and prognostics

  Signs in body and mind, fixed delusions, fear, suspicion and sorrow, variations by temperament and stars, and the prognosis of the disease, including discussion of suicide.

• Second Partition, Sections 1–2: lawful cures and the non-naturals

  Rejection of magical cures; the roles of God, physician and patient; diet, air (with a vast digression on the heavens and the earth), exercise and recreation, sleep, and rectification of the passions through music, mirth and friendship.

• Second Partition, Section 3: a Consolatory Digression

  Remedies of philosophy and scripture against every discontent: deformity, poverty, servitude, imprisonment, the death of friends, disgrace and one's own death.

• Second Partition, Sections 4–5: physic and surgery

  Simples and compounds that purge or alter melancholy, hellebore and antimony, tobacco, bloodletting, cordials, correctors of sleeplessness and fearful dreams, and remedies for each kind of melancholy.

• Third Partition, Sections 1–3: love-melancholy and jealousy

  The nature of love, heroical love as a disease with its causes in idleness and beauty, its symptoms and cures (diet, work, counsel, and best of all letting lovers have their desire), and a section on jealousy.

• Third Partition, Section 4: religious melancholy and despair

  Superstition and zeal in excess, atheism in defect, and despair, with its causes in the devil, melancholy and fear of damnation, its prognosis toward violent death, and cures by physic and good counsel, ending with the precept against solitude and idleness.

Characters

• Democritus Junior, authorial persona

  Burton's mask: a melancholy, laughing scholar who anatomises the madness of the world while confessing his own.

• Democritus of Abdera, patron philosopher

  The laughing atomist, said in a pseudo-Hippocratic letter to have dissected animals in search of the seat of black bile.

• Hippocrates and Galen, medical authorities

  Founders of humoral medicine whose categories structure Burton's account of causes and cures.

• Renaissance physicians, cited authorities

  Writers such as Fernel, Laurentius, Felix Platter, Mercurialis and Montaltus, quoted constantly on definitions, symptoms and remedies.

• The reader, addressee and patient

  Repeatedly addressed as a fellow sufferer, to be persuaded, consoled and advised.

Lessons

• Ordinary sorrow and clinical melancholy are not the same

  Burton distinguishes melancholy dispositions, which no mortal escapes, from melancholy as a settled disease of fear and sadness without cause. The distinction anticipates modern debates about where normal sadness ends and depressive disorder begins.

  • How does Burton decide when sadness has become a disease?
  • Does his phrase 'without any apparent occasion' match modern diagnostic thinking?
  • What is gained and lost by treating melancholy as the character of mortality?

• Writing as self-treatment

  Burton says he wrote of melancholy to be busy and avoid it, and his endless revision of the book reads as a lifelong therapeutic practice. The Anatomy is an early example of a sufferer turning his condition into a field of study.

  • Can scholarship about a condition help the scholar who has it?
  • How does the persona of Democritus Junior protect Burton?

• Causes are many, and most of them are ordinary

  Alongside demons and stars, Burton lists diet, sleep, solitude, idleness, poverty, grief, ambition and too much study. His catalogue resembles a modern biopsychosocial account, in which habits, relationships and circumstances matter as much as bodily humours.

  • Which of Burton's causes would a modern clinician accept, and which reject?
  • Why does he devote so much space to the misery of scholars?

• Every remedy has a dose

  Burton praises music, mirth and company, recommends opiates for sleeplessness, and calls tobacco a sovereign remedy and in the same breath a devilish ruin of body and soul. His pharmacology is humoral, but his sense that the same agent heals or harms by use is permanently relevant.

  • How does the tobacco passage capture an ambivalence still found in debates about psychoactive drugs?
  • Why does Burton think music works on the spirits and arteries as well as the ears?
  • What is the role of the patient's own cooperation in his account of cure?

• Be not solitary, be not idle

  After half a million words, Burton reduces his advice to two precepts against isolation and inactivity. The simplicity of the conclusion, after so much learning, is both comic and genuinely wise, and it echoes modern behavioural activation and social prescribing.

  • Is the closing precept a summary of the book or a confession of its limits?
  • How does Burton's advice compare with current psychological treatments for depression?

Context

Melancholy was a fashionable and much-theorised condition in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, discussed in Timothy Bright's Treatise of Melancholy (1586), represented on stage in Hamlet and Jaques, and associated, following Ficino and the pseudo-Aristotelian Problem XXX, with genius and scholarship. Medicine was still grounded in Galenic humoral theory, though Paracelsian chemistry, new anatomy and religious controversy were unsettling it. Burton wrote in an Oxford shaped by Laudian church politics and by fierce debates over predestination and despair.

Composition

The first edition appeared in quarto in 1621, printed for Henry Cripps at Oxford. Burton enlarged it in folio editions of 1624, 1628, 1632 and 1638; a sixth edition with his final corrections was published posthumously in 1651 (dated 1652 on the engraved title). The frontispiece by C. Le Blon, added in 1628, shows Democritus with emblems of jealousy, solitude, the lover, the hypochondriac, the superstitious man and the maniac, together with the herbs borage and hellebore. The stored Project Gutenberg text follows a modernised nineteenth-century edition corrected against the 1638 edition.

Reception

The book sold well through the seventeenth century, then fell from favour until the Romantics revived it. Samuel Johnson said it was the only book that took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise; Charles Lamb, Keats (whose Lamia drew on it) and Byron admired it. William Osler, a Christ Church man, called it the greatest medical treatise written by a layman. It is now read as a literary masterpiece and as a key source for the history of psychiatry and the concept of depression.

Comparisons

• essays-montaigne

  Montaigne and Burton both write learned, digressive, self-revealing prose stuffed with classical quotation; Montaigne explores himself through essays of mood and opinion, Burton through the pretence of a systematic medical treatise that keeps bursting its frame.

• hippocratic-writings

  The Hippocratic theory of four humours, including black bile, underlies Burton's whole classification, and the pseudo-Hippocratic letter about Democritus dissecting animals supplies his persona.

• galen-selected-works

  Galen's six non-natural things (air, food, exercise, sleep, evacuation, passions) organise Burton's Second Partition on cure, and his account of melancholic temperament is quoted throughout.

• the-consolation-of-philosophy

  Burton's Consolatory Digression belongs to the tradition Boethius founded, answering misfortune with philosophical argument, but adds scripture, jokes and a physician's attention to the body.

• the-sickness-unto-death

  Burton's section on religious despair treats it as a disease with physical and spiritual causes; Kierkegaard two centuries later makes despair the defining condition of a self that does not rest in God, removing it from medicine entirely.

• the-principles-of-psychology

  William James's chapters on habit, emotion and the will are a later, experimental attempt to systematise the same territory Burton covered by compiling authorities.

• novum-organum

  Bacon published his program for a new science built on observation in 1620, a year before the Anatomy, whose method of piling up ancient authorities represents exactly what Bacon hoped to replace.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The preface, Democritus Junior to the Reader, where Burton takes the name of the laughing philosopher, confesses that he writes of melancholy to avoid it, and argues that the whole world is mad. Watch how satire and confession are mixed.
• The outline of partitions, sections, members, and subsections at the head of each Partition. Notice how the scholastic structure promises order while the prose keeps spilling into digressions.
• The digression on the misery of scholars in the First Partition, where Burton names overmuch study as a cause of melancholy. Ask how much of it is about Burton himself, a lifelong Oxford scholar.
• The Consolatory Digression in the Second Partition, which answers poverty, imprisonment, the death of friends, and one's own death with philosophy and scripture, one discontent at a time.
• The section on religious melancholy and despair at the end of the Third Partition, which closes the whole book with the precept against solitude and idleness.

Key terms and names

Democritus Junior

Burton's pen name, borrowed from Democritus of Abdera, who in a legendary letter of Hippocrates was found dissecting animals to find the seat of black bile and laughing at the world's folly.

Black bile

In Galenic medicine, one of the four humours, cold and dry, whose excess or corruption was thought to cause melancholy. The word melancholy itself comes from the Greek for black bile.

Partition

Each of the book's three main divisions: the first on causes and symptoms, the second on cures, the third on love-melancholy and religious melancholy. Each is divided again into sections, members, and subsections.

Dotage

Burton's word, following earlier physicians, for the disordered judgment that defines melancholy as a disease: a dotage without fever, with fear and sadness and no apparent cause.

Non-naturals

The six things of Galenic medicine that are not part of the body but govern its health: air, diet, exercise and rest, sleep and waking, evacuation, and the passions. They organize Burton's cures in the Second Partition.

Hellebore

A powerful purging herb, black hellebore in particular, which ancient physicians gave for madness and melancholy. It appears with borage on the 1628 frontispiece and is discussed at length in the section on physic.

Religious melancholy

Burton's final category, which covers both superstition in excess and despair of salvation. He treats despair as a disease with bodily and spiritual causes, needing both physic and good counsel.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does Burton call himself Democritus Junior, and what reasons does he give in the preface for writing a book about melancholy?
2. Comprehension How does Burton distinguish melancholy as a passing disposition, which he calls the character of mortality, from melancholy as a settled disease?
3. Comprehension What are the six non-natural things, and what does Burton recommend about at least two of them in the Second Partition?
4. Interpretation Burton claims to write of melancholy by being busy so as to avoid melancholy. Is the Anatomy itself, with its endless revisions and quotations, part of his cure? What evidence does the preface give?
5. Interpretation Burton first praises tobacco as divine and superexcellent, then curses it as hellish and devilish when it is abused. What does this double judgment teach about how he thinks of remedies in general?
6. Interpretation Burton lists overmuch study among the causes of melancholy. Why would a scholar write a vast work of scholarship that warns against too much scholarship?
7. Interpretation In the section on religious despair, Burton treats a soul afraid of damnation as needing both a physician and a minister. How does he divide the work between them?
8. Big Question Is sadness a disease to be cured, a condition of being mortal to be endured, or sometimes a call to be heeded?

Faith Connections

• 1 Samuel 16:14-23 (Scripture)

  When an evil spirit from the Lord troubles Saul, David plays the lyre and Saul is refreshed and made well. Burton's subsection on music as a remedy belongs to this oldest picture of music lifting a troubled mind.

• Proverbs 17:22 (Scripture)

  A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. The proverb compresses Burton's whole Galenic picture, in which the passions of the soul change the body, and explains why he prescribes mirth and friendship alongside herbs.

• Genesis 2:18 (Scripture)

  God says it is not good for man to be alone. Burton's closing precept against solitariness is a physician's version of this first judgment about human nature.

• John Cassian, Institutes, Book X (Church Fathers)

  Cassian describes acedia, the restless weariness that attacks monks at midday, and prescribes manual labor, citing Paul's example of working with his own hands. Burton's final counsel to be not idle carries this monastic remedy into a medical treatise.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Melancholy in the broad sense is the character of mortality, shared by all, but in its settled form it is a disease of body and mind with many causes: the stars and the devil, heredity and diet, bad air and sleeplessness, the passions, and idleness and too much study. Since its causes are many, its cures must be many as well, joining God's help, the physician's skill, and the patient's own effort to regulate diet, air, exercise, sleep, and passions. The two causes most within a person's control are solitude and idleness. Therefore the whole art of cure can be summed up in Burton's last precept: be not solitary, be not idle.

Rhetorical device: antithesis. In the Second Partition Burton praises tobacco as divine, rare, superexcellent, a sovereign remedy beyond all panaceas, and in the next breath, when it is taken as tinkers take ale, damns it as hellish, devilish, and the ruin of body and soul. The paired catalogues of praise and abuse show that the same remedy heals or harms according to its use.

Debate: Resolved: Burton is right that idleness is the chief cause of melancholy.

Memory Work

observe this short precept, give not way to solitariness and idleness. Be not solitary, be not idle

I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business

Writing Prompts

Essay: Burton calls himself Democritus Junior, the laughing philosopher, yet he writes the most exhaustive study of sadness in English. Using the preface, the digression on the misery of scholars, and the Consolatory Digression, argue whether laughter in the Anatomy is a cure for melancholy, a symptom of it, or both.

Comparison with The Sickness Unto Death: Burton treats religious despair as a disease with bodily and spiritual causes, curable by physic and good counsel, while Kierkegaard makes despair the condition of every self that does not rest in God. Compare the two accounts of despair and argue which better explains a person who fears he cannot be saved.

Medical Lens

The Anatomy is the central English text in the pre-modern history of depression and one of the richest sources for Renaissance psychiatry, pharmacology and therapeutics. Its definition of melancholy as fear and sadness without cause, its distinction between normal sorrow and disease, and its catalogue of causes (heredity, diet, sleep loss, isolation, idleness, bereavement, poverty, overwork, study) invite comparison with modern accounts of mood disorder, though its framework is Galenic humoralism, astrology and theology. Its therapeutics span the six non-naturals, music therapy, social and occupational remedies, a pharmacopoeia including hellebore, borage, antimony, opiates and tobacco, bloodletting, and pastoral counsel. It is also a key source for love-sickness as a medical diagnosis, for religious melancholy and scrupulosity, and for despair and suicide. Burton's frank account of his own melancholy, and Anthony Wood's later report of a rumour that he hastened his own death to fulfil an astrological prediction, should be treated as biography and hearsay, not as diagnosis.

• Democritus Junior to the Reader

  Burton's confession of melancholy, his account of writing as occupation against it, and the satirical argument that the whole world is mad.

  Melancholia DepressionPhilosophy AS Therapy
• Part. 1, Sect. 1, Memb. 1, Subs. 4–5; Memb. 3, Subs. 1

  Distinctions between madness, frenzy, melancholy as disposition and melancholy as habit, and the definition of melancholy as dotage without fever, with fear and sadness.

  Melancholia DepressionMadness PsychosisHumoral Medicine
• Part. 1, Sect. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 5–7

  Bad air, immoderate exercise, solitariness and idleness, and disordered sleeping and waking as causes of melancholy.

  Sleep InsomniaPublic Health SanitationMelancholia Depression
• Part. 1, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 15

  Overmuch study as a cause of madness, with the digression on the misery of scholars and why the Muses are melancholy.

  Melancholia DepressionMadness Psychosis
• Part. 1, Sect. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 2; Memb. 2

  Symptoms in the mind: fear, sorrow, suspicion, jealousy, fixed delusions such as believing oneself made of glass, and the windy hypochondriacal melancholy.

  Madness PsychosisHypochondriaObsession MonomaniaNeurosis Anxiety
• Part. 1, Sect. 4, Memb. 1

  Prognostics of melancholy, including Burton's discussion of suicide among melancholics and the question of how such deaths should be judged.

  SuicideDeath Dying
• Part. 2, Sect. 2, Memb. 6, Subs. 3–4

  Music, mirth, merry company and fair objects as remedies for a sorrowful heart, including a cup of strong drink.

  Philosophy AS TherapyAlcohol
• Part. 2, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 1

  Emetic simples, hellebore and antimony, and the double-edged praise and condemnation of tobacco.

  Pharmacology PoisonsAddiction
• Part. 2, Sect. 5, Memb. 1, Subs. 2 and 6

  Bloodletting for melancholy; correctors of insomnia and fearful dreams using poppy, mandrake, henbane, nightshade, hemp-seed and opiates.

  BloodlettingSleep InsomniaOpium LaudanumDreams Nightmares
• Part. 3, Sect. 2

  Heroical or love-melancholy treated as a disease, with symptoms (wasting, sleeplessness, sighing) and cures from diet and labour to marriage.

  Sexuality MedicalizedMelancholia Depression
• Part. 3, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 2–6

  Religious despair: definitions, causes in the devil, melancholy and terrifying preaching, symptoms of fear and anxiety, prognosis toward violent death, and cure by physic and good counsel.

  Melancholia DepressionSuicideNeurosis AnxietyPhilosophy AS Therapy

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write a winter evening in Burton's rooms at Christ Church in 1638 as a student arrives seeking help for love-melancholy and receives an hour of quotation, kindness and practical advice.

• Dialogue

  Stage a case conference in which Burton and a modern psychiatrist review the same patient, each translating the other's vocabulary: black bile and serotonin, the non-naturals and lifestyle factors.

• Essay

  Compare Burton's definition of melancholy with the criteria for major depressive disorder. What does each include that the other leaves out, and why?

• Poetry

  Write a modern answer to the Author's Abstract of Melancholy that alternates between 'naught so sweet' and 'naught so sad', set in a contemporary bedroom with a phone instead of castles in the air.

Further Reading

• Saturn and Melancholy, Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl

  Classic study of melancholy in philosophy, medicine and art.

• Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times, Stanley W. Jackson

• The Elizabethan Malady, Lawrence Babb

  Melancholy in English literature 1580–1642.

• Robert Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy, Mary Ann Lund

• A Treatise of Melancholy, Timothy Bright

  The 1586 English treatise that preceded Burton.