The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy*

Abstract

Surveying the world outside his study in Christ Church, Oxford in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton diagnosed an epidemic. Melancholy was now, he wrote, ‘a disease so frequent . . . in these our daies, so often happening . . . in our miserable times, as few there are that feele not the smart of it’. It being ‘a disease so grievous, so common’, he claimed to ‘know not wherein to do a more generall service, and spend my time better, then to prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universall a malady, an Epidemicall disease, that so often, so much crucifies the body and minde’.1 Burton had little difficulty in finding a range of neoteric philosophical and medical authorities to support his diagnosis. Whilst examining the spleen and its role in generating hypochondriacal melancholy in the 1552 edition of his De anima, Philipp Melanchthon had remarked that there were so many cases of the disease it was pointless to count the sufferers.2 Later in the century André Du Laurens had concluded his chapter on the same species of melancholy by noting its frequency ‘in these miserable times’, and pointing out that ‘there are not many people which feele not some smatch thereof’.3 ‘This disease is most frequent in these days’, agreed Girolamo Mercuriale, in the chapter on melancholy in his Medicina practica (1601).4 These observations were further supported by Giulio Cesare Chiodini, who asserted in his Responsiones et consultationes medicinales (1607) that ‘in our times scarcely anyone can be found who is immune from its contamination’. Melancholy, according to Chiodini, had not only spread throughout the population; it was, as he put it, the ‘fountain of almost all other diseases’ afflicting his society.5