The Anatomy of Melancholy - Robert Burton

Robert Burton reportedly wrote "of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy." But he found the condition so persistent, confounding, "irregular, obscure, various, so infinite," that it comes to overwhelm and define the whole human condition. The result is a "labyrinthine, beguiling masterpiece"--an embattled outpouring of medical, religious, literary, and philosophical analysis--and one of the major documents of modern European civilization.

The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) is premised on the first completely naturalistic theory of disease, humoral theory (credited to Hippocrates), in which illness is presumed to be caused by a disequilibrium of four fluids ("humors") within the body. Treatment proceeded by regulating the fluids via draining, purging, bloodletting, and similar techniques. This remained the prevailing medical paradigm for centuries, including through the Middle Ages, when it was syncretized with supernatural and astrological influences. Today, we still describe temperaments recognizable to Medieval humoral theory: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, jovial, saturnine, venereal, etc.--including "hypochondria" (or "hypo" for short, literally meaning "under the ribs"), referring to the supposed anatomical locus of (imagination-deranging) black bile.

The book was a favorite of Samuel Johnson, John Keats, and pronounced by Lewellyn Powys to be "the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing." Burton's example established the so-called "anatomy" genre: a "heterogeneous, omnivorous, encyclopedic, rhetorically experimental, stylistically dense form, in which linguistic features--diction, syntax, metaphor--become the vehicle for intellectual inquiry." Much the same method of "careful disorderliness" is pursued in Moby-Dick, famously classified by Northrop Frye as "part anatomy and part romance."

For this meetup, we will read the following selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy:

• Section: 3.4.1.1 "Religious melancholy"
• [through] the end (Section 3.4.2.6, "Cure of Despair by Physic")

The Anatomy of Melancholy:

• Ex-Classics
• Gutenberg
• Amazon (400th anniversary edition)
• Librivox (Volume 3, parts 35-49) 7h 28m

Extracts:

• "And what to me, thus pining for some one who could page me a quotation from Burton on Blue Devils; what to me, indeed, were flat repetitions of long-drawn yarns, and the everlasting stanzas of Black-eyed Susan sung by our full forecastle choir? Staler than stale ale." (Mardi, 1.1)
• "From my window, where I was reading Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, I saw him in the act." ("Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!")
• "... I can imagine you seated on that dear, delightful, old-fashioned sofa; your head supported by its luxurious padding, and with feet perched aloft on the aspiring back of that straight limbed, stiff-necked, quaint old chair, which, as our facetious W— assured me, was the identical seat in which old Burton composed his Anatomy of Melancholy." ("Fragments from a Writing Desk")
• "... whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." (Moby-Dick, 1)
• ".... thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael." (Moby-Dick, 42)
• "... when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale.... he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac;" (Moby-Dick, 74)
• "A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that." (Moby-Dick, 16)
• "... in ten thousand ways, as if by a malicious agency, we mortals are woefully put out and tormented; and that, too, by things in themselves so exceedingly trivial, that it would seem almost impiety to ascribe them to the august gods. No; there must exist some greatly inferior spirits... and through them it must be, that we are thus grievously annoyed." (Mardi, 1.87)
• "All men are possessed by devils; but as these devils are sent into men, and kept in them... limboed in a bridewell; so, it may be more just to say, that the devils themselves are possessed by men..." (Mardi, 1.104)
• "An operator, ah? he operates, does he? My friend, then, is something like what the Indians call a Great Medicine, is he? He operates, he purges, he drains off the repletions." (Confidence-Man, 36)
• "The 'blood royal' is an extremely thick, depraved fluid; formed principally of raw fish, bad brandy, and European sweetmeats, and is charged with a variety of eruptive humours, which are developed in sundry blotches and pimples upon the august face of 'majesty itself', and the angelic countenances of the 'princes and princesses of the blood royal'!" (Typee, 26)
• "He asked me... how often I had been bled during my life..." (White-Jacket, 77)
• "'I'll bleed him!' cried Johnson at last—'run for a calabash, one of you!'" (Omoo, 50)

This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.