Robert Burton

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton is a monumental work that delves deeply into the causes, symptoms, and cures of melancholy, a condition we might refer to today as depression. Set in the form of a scholarly treatise, Burton's work examines melancholy through various lenses, including medicine, philosophy, history, and literature. The book is an elaborate and erudite survey...

A guidebook to melancholia or depression, and a masterly, all-encompassing examination of the human condition. The Anatomy of Melancholy is the vast and only work by Robert Burton, the seventeenth-century English priest and scholar. It 'opens and cuts up' the condition of melancholy, or depression, as we know it today, and in doing so explores a dizzying range of additional...

Dryness, paleness, waking, sighing, despair, frenzy, death: love's repercussions can be dire indeed. Perhaps that is why Robert Burton devoted the largest part of his pioneering 17th-century psychological work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, to this supreme passion. Edited to offer the modern reader easier access to this classic text, this abridged version preserves all the fantastic variety of the original,...