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An Oxford scholar dissects sadness as an anatomist would a body, tracing melancholy through its kinds, causes, symptoms, and cures, and closes with the plainest prescription in the book: be not solitary, be not idle.
Mind Map
Core Message
Burton begins by separating passing sadness from settled disease. Transitory melancholy comes and goes with every small occasion of sorrow, and no man living is free of it, not Socrates, not the most fortunate of the Romans. Only when such moods are fed and neglected do they harden into the chronic malady the book anatomizes.
Following Democritus, who cut up beasts in his garden to find the seat of black bile, Burton cuts melancholy into partitions, sections, members, and subsections, showing its causes, symptoms, and several cures so that, as he puts it, it may be the better avoided. Naming and sorting the disease is the first step out of it.
Burton confesses that he writes of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy, since there is no greater cause of the disease than idleness and no better cure than business. The enormous book ends where it began, with the precept to be neither solitary nor idle.
Charms, spells, and magicians are rejected as unlawful. The real physic is ordinary: rectify diet, air, exercise, and sleep, resist beginnings, open grief to a trusty friend, use music and merry company, and take medicine with moderation. The mind must be satisfied first, or the body can never be cured.
Summary
The book opens with a long satirical preface, Democritus Junior to the Reader, in which Burton explains his borrowed name. Hippocrates once found Democritus in his garden at Abdera among the carcasses of beasts he had cut up, searching for the seat of black bile so that he might cure melancholy in himself and teach others to prevent it. Burton takes up that unfinished work, surveys the follies of kingdoms, professions, and persons, and concludes that all the world is melancholy or mad. His own motive is frank: he writes of melancholy by being busy, to avoid melancholy, for idleness is its greatest cause and business its best cure.
The First Partition defines the disease and traces its causes. Melancholy in disposition, the passing heaviness that follows any sorrow, need, or care, spares no one; neglected, it settles into a habit, a chronic dotage without fever whose ordinary companions are fear and sadness without apparent cause. Burton sorts the settled disease by seat into head melancholy, melancholy of the whole body, and melancholy of the hypochondries, then catalogues causes from God, devils, witches, and stars down through old age, inheritance, diet, bad air, immoderate exercise, idleness, solitariness, and the passions, with overmuch study earning a digression on the misery of scholars.
The symptoms follow: causeless fear and sorrow, suspicion and jealousy, sudden swings between laughter and weeping, fixed delusions, and a restless mind that builds castles in the air and cannot let a grievance go, returning to it a thousand times against its will. The pain, Burton insists, exceeds bodily torture; if there is a hell upon earth, it is found in the melancholy man's heart, and the prognostics warn that the disease may end in despair or self-destruction. That severity is his argument for taking sadness seriously and treating it early.
The Second Partition turns to cures. Unlawful means are dismissed, and lawful ones begin with prayer and proceed through physic. The heart of the cure is the rectifying of the six non-natural things: diet, retention and evacuation, air (the excuse for a famous digression that roves over the whole globe like a hawk let off the fist), exercise of body and mind, sleep, and the perturbations of the mind. The patient must be willing and must resist beginnings, and above all must not smother grief, for grief concealed strangles the soul while a friend's counsel is a charm. Music, mirth, and merry company are medicines in their own right; a long consolatory digression offers remedies against poverty, imprisonment, banishment, the death of friends, slander, and every ordinary discontent; drugs and surgery come last and with caution.
The Third Partition treats the two grand special forms. Love-melancholy is anatomized through its causes, idleness again chief among them, its absurd symptoms, and its cures, of which the last and best is to let lovers have their desire and marry; jealousy follows as its bitter appendix. Religious melancholy, a species Burton claims as his own, is love-melancholy whose object is God: in excess it breeds superstition, enthusiasm, and self-appointed prophets, in defect atheism and despair, which he answers with physic, good counsel, and comfort. The whole work then closes on one short precept: be not solitary, be not idle.
Key Concepts
Burton distinguishes transitory melancholy, the heaviness that goes and comes with every small occasion of sorrow, from melancholy as a habit, a settled disease. As a single distillation makes a cough and a continual one a consumption of the lungs, melancholy provocations repeated and unresisted become fixed.
The distinction marks the hinge between ordinary sorrow and illness, and it shows where prevention works: resist beginnings, before a passing state becomes a permanent one.
Borrowed from the physicians, the six are diet, retention and evacuation, air, exercise, sleeping and waking, and the perturbations of the mind. Burton uses them twice over, first as the catalogue of necessary causes and then as the program of cure.
The frame turns melancholy from a fate into a regimen. Much of what feeds or starves the disease lies in daily habits that are at least partly in the sufferer's power.
The settled disease is divided by its seat into head melancholy, melancholy of the whole body, and hypochondriacal or windy melancholy, and by its object into love-melancholy and religious melancholy.
Sadness is not treated as one undifferentiated thing. Burton's insistence on kinds, seats, and objects puts diagnosis before cure and lets remedies be fitted to the particular case.
Mental Models
Burton handles an overwhelming subject the way an anatomist handles a body: he cuts it into partitions, sections, members, and subsections, with synoptic tables that keep the whole in view while each part is examined in turn.
Any vast or frightening problem becomes more tractable when divided. Mapping sadness into parts replaces a fog of misery with a list of causes and remedies that can be addressed one at a time.
There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, Burton holds, and no better cure than business. He applies the rule to himself: the book exists because writing it kept its melancholy author occupied.
When the mind begins to prey on itself, give it employment. Occupation crowds out the rumination that idleness leaves room to grow, which is why the book's final advice is to be neither solitary nor idle.
Grief concealed strangles the soul, Burton warns, while misery imparted to a discreet, trusty, loving friend is eased at once, for a friend's counsel is a charm and the friend sees what the sufferer cannot see for passion.
It argues against smothering trouble in one's own breast. Saying the grief aloud to someone trusted is itself treatment in Burton's scheme, not a confession of weakness.
Selected Quotes
I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.
Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.
if there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart.
Be not solitary, be not idle.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10800/pg10800.txt
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions.
First published in 1621; Burton kept enlarging it through successive editions, and the Project Gutenberg text follows the sixth edition of 1651-2.