The Anatomy of Melancholy

Robert Burton (1577-1640) was an English scholar at Oxford who wrote one of the most successful books of all time, called The Anatomy of Melancholy. How successful was it? From its first printing in 1621 to its eighth in 1676, each sold out. Nothing was ever removed, only rearranged or added to by the author. The book doubled from 353,369 when it was first printed to a massive 516,384 words by the time the author died. To get a sense of the scope of the work, my Eye of the Moon is approximately 160,000 words and is considered lengthy for a novel by modern standards. At the extreme end is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at 9.6 million words covering seven volumes.

To Burton, life was a constant struggle against melancholy, an affliction from which he suffered. His remedy was to discover everything he could about it by researching anything that had ever been written or contained the slightest reference to it, no matter how small or inconsequential. This included all poetry, geography, biography, astrology, alchemy, botany, and any other branch of knowledge, ancient or modern, and in several languages. He read it all. In many ways, his personal cure for melancholy was writing about it, which he did by incessantly amending the work for most of his life.

The result was so diverse that it touched on almost every aspect of human existence, hence it was called an anatomy. Anatomy in those days had a specialized meaning. It was a voguish term for an analysis of a multifaceted subject from ancient times to the present, covering its every conceivable aspect, which in Burton’s case was melancholy. Melancholy was also a specialized term. It meant a mental disorder characterized by gloom, sullenness, irritability, and a tendency to violent and unwarranted anger. The word is derived from the Greek word melancholia, meaning literally, “black bile.” (Melano, meaning black, and Khole, bile.) In modern terms, the condition is called manic-depression.

Burton was the first systematic psychiatrist, and The Anatomy is the most extensive collection of literature ever gathered for a scientific inquiry. It is arranged in parts called partitions, in a style known as “cento”—a patchwork of passages of other books quoted in full and stitched together. The arrangements and Burton’s commentary give it direction and purpose. Much of it is in Latin with translations into English. Much is written in prose, but a great deal is written in verse.

Medical science in those days was based on the four humors, which were thought to be the sources of temperaments and illnesses. The humors were called black choler (black bile), yellow choler (yellow bile), phlegm (mucus), and blood.

From these four humors were derived the four temperaments: melancholic (gloomy), phlegmatic (unemotional and easy going), choleric (quick-tempered), and sanguine (optimistic or ruddy-complexioned).

Burton was chiefly interested in black choler (depression). It was his life’s work. One of his key findings was the extraordinary extent to which depression had plagued humans from earliest recorded history to modern times, particularly among the most gifted. He thought the condition was incurable, but manageable through daily regimen, drugs, consciousness of the condition, and by talking to someone who was sympathetic and understanding. Its causes were many, but he noted that the structure of society, love, and childhood played significant parts.

Burton, like his contemporary, the poet George Herbert (1593-1633), lived in the tumultuous seventeenth century, where three faiths—Protestantism, Catholicism, and the Church of England—vied for control. Unlike Herbert, Burton was able to secure a living, an income from a church office, early on that allowed him to study and write The Anatomy in relative peace and luxury.

Burton also amassed a collection of approximately 1,738 books during his lifetime, which, upon his death, was divided between the Bodleian Library and the library of Christ Church, where they remain to this day.

The noted Oxford historian, Anthony Wood (1632-1695), commented that The Anatomy sold so well and at such a profit that the publisher, Henry Cripps, got himself an estate through its sales alone.

To get a sense of Burton as a man, Wood said that to arouse himself from the depressions that would plague him, Burton would go down to the foot of the Oxford bridge and listen to the barge-men scold, storm, and swear at each other. Their words and antics would cause him to break into peals of laughter, breaking his gloomy mood.

Burton’s Anatomy was extremely popular during his lifetime, and that popularity has continued into the present. It was the favorite book of John Keats. Phillip Pullman, of His Dark Materials fame, said, “It is one of the indispensable books; for my money, it is the best of all.” Researching reviews on Amazon, I found a surprising number of reviewers who remarked that The Anatomy of Melancholy is the best book that they have ever read.

What is also significant about Burton is that he was perhaps the last person in history to have consumed the entirety of his subject and so be able to sort it, process it, and write about it from that point of view. After him, knowledge about the world grew well beyond the capacity of a single person to acquire and retain. The rise of the specialist came after, and the ability to connect all human knowledge into a sensible whole within a single mind was gone forever.