![]() He addresses diet (good and bad) and appetite he considers witches and magicians he surveys any number of physical maladies from ‘phrenzy’ to ‘lycanthropia’. In 'The First Partition' he looks at causes of melancholy. He divides his book into three Partitions. But for Burton psychology underpinned all. According to traditional medicine, accepted generally by Jacobeans, melancholy was caused by ‘black bile’. However, throughout his life he suffered from depression and was therefore able to bring personal experience to what could have been a dry, if gargantuan academic study. Robert Burton (1577-1640) was an Oxford scholar, a vicar and a mathematician with a stupendously wide reading habit which was supported by an exceptional memory: he remembered virtually everything he read. But despite the subtitle’s length, it does not do justice to the immense scope of the study. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. ![]() In Three Maine Partitions with their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Its subtitle explains much: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of It. The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the most remarkable books ever written. First published in 1621, and hardly ever out of print since, it is a huge, varied, idiosyncratic, entertaining and learned survey of the experience of melancholy, seen from just about every possible angle that could be imagined.
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