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Zodiac signs gemini celebrities5/29/2023 But even as a progressive of his era, he was also - like every visionary - a product of his era. That Burton applied a term of physiology to the understanding of a psychology not yet born is already a staggering leap of the imagination. The birth of neuroscience was still three and a half centuries away. Psychology was not even a faint contour in humanity’s imagination. But medicine then was still as crude as a stone blade directed at the body, to the total Cartesian exclusion of the mind. Frontispiece of the second edition, 1626.īurton inhabited the golden age of Renaissance anatomy, when Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings peered into the distant future of medicine. Like Whitman did with his Leaves of Grass, Burton kept obsessively revising and expanding his magnum opus, publishing five more editions by the end of his life - no small triumph for a book in the first century since the Printing Revolution, or a book in any era, especially one nearly a thousand pages long. Keats - whose brief and light-giving life was punctuated by periodic onslaughts of darkness - declared it his favorite book. He kept trying to leave the university and start an independent life, but never quite managed, lamenting his “hopes frustrated” and feeling “left behind, as a Dolphin on shore.”Įventually - centuries before psychologists demonstrated that revising our inner narrative about a situation is the only way to improve our experience of that situation - Burton reoriented to his circumstance, coming to feel that his “monastick life” protected him “from those tumults & troubles of the world.” Out of this conflicted isolation, he composed The Anatomy of Melancholy, subtitled What it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes, & severall cures of it.” It went on to touch lives as varied as Samuel Johnson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Nick Cave. This “melancholy,” which often left him with “a heavy heart and an ugly head,” was so disabling that it took him more than a decade to complete his studies at Oxford. “That which others hear or read of,” he wrote, “I felt and practised myself they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.” Robert Burton by Gilbert Jackson, 1635.īurton was only a teenager when he was plunged into his first episode of debilitating depression - a term that did not yet exist in the modern sense, because mental health did not yet exist as a clinical concept. Epochs before modern neuroscience came to locate the crucible of consciousness in the body, centuries before William James proffered his pioneering theory of how our bodies affect our emotions, Robert Burton (February 8, 1577–January 25, 1640) took up these questions in his 1621 tome The Anatomy of Melancholy ( public library | public domain), observing that “there is almost no part of the body, which being distempered, doth not cause this malady.”Īn impressive florilegium nearing a thousand pages strewn with a progenitor of hypertext, the book weaves together a cornucopia of quotations from earlier writers, from Seneca to Solomon, to illustrate Burton’s central points - many radical then, some radical still - about a subject he examines “philosophically, medicinally, historically, opened and cut up” a subject of which he had an early and intimate experience.
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