Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is, as a brief preamble to this book puts it, “perhaps the largest, strangest and most unwieldy self-help book ever written”. I am not sure there is any “perhaps” about it. I can certainly attest to its unwieldiness, in the form of its one-volume NYRB edition: so thick as to be almost cubic, my first copy disintegrated as huge blocks of pages became unmoored from the spine; my second copy had to be left behind in a previous dwelling as it was simply too heavy for my luggage. Never mind, I thought: I’ll buy a digital version. Reader, be very careful about doing this: the Kindle edition I bought off the obvious online retailer may be weightless, but mine had been edited by an idiot, or an algorithm: I was terribly excited when I came across a sentence beginning “but we weave the equal internet nevertheless, twist the same rope time and again …” Did Burton, I wondered, coin the word “internet”, only for it to remain unused for centuries? The OED didn’t think so, and looking at the same passage in another online version I saw that the original word was “web”.
But one of the reasons that I was temporarily enticed by the possibility of “internet” being a Burtonian neologism was that his work, first published in 1621, connects almost everything that could be known about what we would today loosely call mental illnesses: it consists of citation after citation of various authorities, anecdotes and sources, threaded together with Burton’s eccentric wit and generous humanity. If someone were to produce a book of similar scope and ambition today and publish it online, half the text would be hyperlinks. As Burton put it himself, with crazy self-deprecation: “Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dunghills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, fantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all (’tis partly affected), thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.”
Mary Ann Lund’s book serves as an introduction not just to Burton’s magnum opus but to contemporary and historical conceptions of melancholy. Do not make the mistake of confusing “melancholy” with what we now call depression. Her brief is not so much to say why or how Burton’s style is so delightful but to give us a learned, broad and readable picture of Renaissance medicine, using Burton’s book as a starting point. Melancholy, in the early modern world, could present itself in bizarre ways. Think “Embarrassing Early Modern European Bodies”. She tells, for instance, the story of the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), whose “postmortem revealed that his bladder was malformed and that the supplementary bladder was nearly six times as large as the main chamber”. The apparent reason was that he had regularly ignored the call of nature while being absorbed in his work. (That George Eliot chose the name for the dry-as-dust obsessive in Middlemarch is no coincidence; but I am not sure she knew about the bladder. Burton, whom she would have read, doesn’t mention it, but does cite Casaubon a couple of times.)
On a related topic, Lund retells from Burton the story of the Sienese gentleman who refused to piss, on the grounds that if he did so the stream would inundate the town, despite several physicians’ attempts to persuade him otherwise. In the end they set the next house on fire and persuaded him that only he could extinguish it. Lund makes the point that Jonathan Swift was a reader of the Anatomy and speculates that he used this story when Gulliver saves the empress of Lilliput’s chambers. (I am inclined to believe her.)
“People would think they were made of glass, or that there were vipers or eels in their bellies; or there is the case of the Swiss man who fell into a pit with frogspawn in it: he swallowed some of the water and started believing that frogs were hatching in his belly; “and do you not hear them croak?” he would ask physicians who kept trying to convince him that it was nothing but wind. He went to various countries to study medicine himself for seven years in order to find a cure and seems to have turned out all right in the end.”
The interesting thing about this story, as it is told by Lund, is that she only chooses one of the versions in Burton’s Anatomy. The one she selects is perfectly good – Burton, when on song, as he is most of the time, is incapable of writing a dull sentence (a mad or almost impenetrably long sentence, but never a dull one, which is why his book has remained in print for 400 years) – but she omits another, which contains this memorable formulation: “Breec, okex, coax, coax, oop, oop”. In other words, we actually hear the croaking. Burton is irrepressibly and delightfully eccentric, happy to go very much off-piste as regarding the rhetorical conventions of the day. Anthony Burgess said, of the Anatomy, that it “is, by a magnificent and somehow very English irony, one of the great comic works of the world”.
One might not come away with this feeling by reading Lund’s book before Burton’s. One problem is that, for her 250 pages, we have to take seriously the whole absurd business of early medicine, with its humours of black and yellow bile, of choler and phlegm; of the influence of the planets, and of, particularly, the influence of religion and indeed God himself. Did any medicine in those days, you could be forgiven for asking, actually work? But the fact that it didn’t, or not much, is one of the reasons Burton’s book is so humane, so equivocal and so ultimately forgiving.
• A User’s Guide to Melancholy is published by Cambridge University Press (£19.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
