For a model which concentrates merely on symptoms, as much contemporary pharmaceutically led medicine does, cannot be as effective as one which also addresses causes. One suspects most of us would.īut the lesson here is Da Monte’s diverse, comprehensive and individual approach. The Earl asked for and received a compromise on the sex ban, did otherwise as he was told, and healed. Da Monte told his patient to leave the stressful environment of Court, to abstain from pork, fish and sex, and to spend easeful time at the Earl’s family home on Lake Constance. My favourite of Burton’s case histories is the story of the Earl of Montford, afflicted with dejection, who was treated by the Paduan physician Giambattista da Monte in 1549. He is adamant that there is no universal cure: treatment must be tailored to the individual. As a consequence, Burton suggests, it must therefore be treated in a multi-dimensional way. It is a disease which afflicts the soul and spirit as much as the body and mind.
Rather, what is thrilling about melancholy for us now is that it is a holistic condition. As Lund puts it, wisely, “substituting our new words for old detracts from the dignity of those who suffered, talked about and treated mental disorders in the past’. It is not for us to diagnose these conditions. Here is the man who was afraid to urinate lest he drown his town here the baker who believed himself made of butter and became understandably fearful of standing near his oven here is Charles VI of France who believed he was made of glass, and the Emperor Charlemagne, who became infatuated with a woman, and on her death with her ring, and after the ring was cast into a lake, with the lake. She picks out some of Burton’s case studies of melancholy’s extremes. “It is Siren-like and alluring, promising the pleasurable life of solitude, leisure, and contemplation before it traps its victim into an inescapable cycle of loneliness and self-destructive thought patterns,” Lund writes, of the melancholy Burton studied. We may feel melancholy without knowing quite why we may even enjoy it, which former ages saw as one of its dangers. Welsh has an untranslatable word for it, hiraeth, a kind of melancholy produced by feeling alienated from one’s dream of home. There is longing, nostalgia and some regret in it. It has become a thoughtful sort of sadness, one that is not necessarily entirely unpleasant. So buy it now.Suggested reading The sad loss of our common ritualsĪlthough we have abandoned melancholy as a medical condition, we have retained something of its broad and pervading air. And not only that, but it's useful: it makes you less melancholy. The Latin is all translated, apart from a bit about the aphrodisiac diet of the Sybarites, as this is a reprint of the 1932 edition.
Once you do, you realise that he is a rollicking, more-ish writer, from an age that produced the nation's best prose. (Although I know one person who is doing just that.) It takes only a couple of minutes to get acclimatised to Burton's rhythms and phrasing. No one on earth is going to expect you to read it cover to cover. It is the ideal book to dip into, though. The only reason you should not take it on holiday is because it will make your luggage too heavy. Say that you're taking this on holiday, as poor Alain de Botton did, and you get heaved straight into Pseuds' Corner. The slack browser who gets the gist of the introduction, "Democritus to the Reader" (Democritus was the laughing philosopher another clue that this is a comedy), will realise that as far as Burton is concerned, everyone on earth is either stupid or mad (himself included). When opened at random, it offers not only dense slabs of 17th-century prose, but insane lists that seem to go on for ever, meandering digressions, whole chunks of italicised Latin. The lazy browser won't even pick this book off a shelf, let alone open it. for hope of gain to lie, flatter, and with hyperbolical elogiums and commendations to magnify and extol an illiterate unworthy idiot for his excellent virtues, whom they should rather, as Machiavel observes, vilify and rail at downright for his most notorious villainies and vices." And that's a good quote to be getting on with: it shows you that Burton is on the side of the angels, that he's prepared to stick his neck out, and that he is funny. "To say truth, 'tis the common fortune of most scholars to be servile and poor, to complain pitifully, and lay open their wants to their respective patrons. Burton, you suspect, felt the miseries of scholars keenly. For it is not just Burton's thoughts on the subject of melancholy, but the thoughts of everyone who had ever thought about it, or about other things, whether that be goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, drink, kissing, jealousy, or scholarship.