Journal

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The material for this conclusion to our series is taken from the end of Robert Burton’s introduction where be both justifies and apologises for his work.

In one of my favourite moments there is a suggestion that he find it a bit embarrassing and vulgar not to have done the whole thing in Latin. His publishers wouldn’t permit that approach and theirs was a wise choice. Elsewhere Burton has explained how he has kept the work practical by avoiding ‘fustian phrases’ and ‘hyperbolical exornations’. This book wasn’t an affectation to grace rich libraries, it was a book written to be read and to be useful. Although its dimensions meant it was expensive The Anatomy Of Melancholy sold well and was reprinted in a series of expanding editions through Burton’s life and remains in print today.

The book’s humour, generosity, peculiarity and practicality must all have contributed to its enduring appeal, as must the continuing prevalence of its subject matter. Through the series we have learnt many practical approaches to avoiding melancholy, which seem as sensible now as they did four hundred years ago and when forcing himself to boil his 1500 page effort to a single maxim our guide leaves us with a simple twined imperative, “be not solitary, be not idle”.

At the time of making this series many millions of people around the world were forced to separate themselves from others and cease their regular activities. It has been a time of melancholy, but just as in the Episode 1 Robert Burton told us he wrote this book about melancholy in order to avoid being melancholy, so making this series has kept its makers from the same ‘feral plague’.

We hope that you have found some consolation in these 35 extracts and direct you to their source, but if you choose to read either our stage adaptation or the primary text we urge you to do so only in moderation, a little each day, in a well lit room with good air.

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You may have thought that cures through sleep had been fully dealt with in Episode 26, but those approaches were all about the physical context in which sleep can be ‘procured’, this episode, in line with Episode 33, takes a medicinal approach. Here are things to imbibe, smell or apply. In short, these are the pre-cursors of our sleeping pills. None of them are easily sourced today, though if you have a compliant pet obtaining the earwax of a dog may not be beyond you.

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This episode contains a detailed recipe for a dish of ram’s brain that will cure melancholy. It is a passage I once used when explaining to the uninitiated how The Anatomy Of Melancholy mixes credible advice with crazy seventeenth century nonsense. However, since talking to a neuroscientist last year I’ve had to abandon this approach. He considered the cure not to be totally beyond the bounds of possibility. His reasoning was that if our melancholic had low serotonin levels and the ram’s brain contained serotonin then eating the brain could help, provided it were cooked gently and the serotonin survived the stomach’s acids.

I enjoy being taken to a world in which coffee is just an exotic rumour, being so drunk you vomit is recommended once a month and drug called Bang puts its adherents into a state of ecstasy. Much of this comes as a welcome contrast to the author’s familiar promotion of moderation as the best policy.

So far no one has stepped forward to persuade me that I’ll be cheered up by having hot ram’s lungs applied to my forehead. Surely that is crazy seventeenth century nonsense, but then maybe we shouldn’t dismiss anything without trying it out.

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This episode weighs up the merits of using medicines to cure melancholy and there is much to enjoy here.

Initially Robert Burton shares with us his cautious scepticism, after all there is an ‘accurate description’ of people who live an extraordinary span of years in Iceland by entirely avoiding the medical profession. He backs this argument up with a macabre joke about the relative dangers of treatment by physicians or pharmacists before conducting a witty retreat to ensure he doesn’t alienate those may later have to call on for help.

A concern about side effects leads to caution about too ready or lavish a prescription of medicines, a caution which remains with us today.

There is a brilliant cutting down to size of ‘bombast physicians’ (a phrase I am constantly looking to adapt for everyday use). Their cures, which now sound like ‘alternative medicine’, Burton characterises as ‘prodigious, sumptuous, far-fetched, rare [and] conjectural’. One wonders what the few known common garden herbs’ were used by ‘many an old wife or country woman’.

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The book’s first partition regularly reads like a big list of depressing things that can make you feel depressed. The second partition, focusing on cures, is much more positive and in line with its mirroring of the first, here is a big list of reassuring advice for life. If you feel able follow its suggestions then yours will be a good, content life lived with an easy conscience.

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This episode is short and sweet, a balm for anyone who is furious about being overlooked or overshadowed, squeezed out or undervalued. It speaks to a lot of what we see today and was apparently also seen four hundred years ago – presumably has always been seen.

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Classics are coming think and fast now. Yesterday’s episode was my favourite episode yesterday, today’s episode may well be my favourite today.

What can you do to cure someone of the misery of a loved one dying? It seems impossible and yet Burton tries. He appeals to logic, that sleep is peaceful and death is a continual sleep, so why should we be afraid of that. In a beautiful passage about the inevitability of death he describes how great cities have a limited span before being ‘involved in perpetual night’. He tries the religious consolation of a happy second meeting before setting out the consolation of a happy release. Finally, in a heartbreakingly touching passage he takes us through a consolation for a mother who has lost a child. It is sad and yet glorious stuff.

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This episode starts with a reflection on whether force of will is sufficient to stave off the advance of melancholy. Recent public information campaigns to increase the understanding of mental health take a clear position on this, they seek to rebuff the idea that depression reflects a weakness of character, depression is an illness, traced in many cases to a chemical imbalance, a lack of serotonin, in this circumstance to tell a depressed person to ‘snap out of it’ is akin, as robert Burton says “[to] bid him that is diseased not to feel pain”

In recent months we have all been enforced or encouraged to isolate or distance ourselves from other human company. We will each have our own judgement on the psychological effects of this change. Perhaps we now have a stronger sense of the uplifting powers of good company and friendship than we did before, certainly Burton is convinced of them. He is convinced that if we are feeling melancholic then hanging out with a friend should help. Rather controversially however his advice does encourage friends melancholics to flog them if being nice to them doesn’t cheer them up – it is difficult to imagine how this might help and we do not endorse this course of action.

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Sound and ready sleepers can’t easily put themselves in the place of those who struggle to acquire and retain the state. A lack of sleep is depressing and debilitating, a vicious circle in which anxiety over sleep makes sleep more difficult. In this episode Robert Burton offers sensible advice and our actors pass this on from their beds.

An adaptation of Robert Burton’s extraordinary 400 year old book.

More details on this series, the stage version and Stan’s Cafe at: www.stanscafe.co.uk

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This episode starts with one of Burton’s fabulous plays on scale. On this occasion he zooms in from the macro to the micro. We should keep active because the natural order of the physical world is movement and evidence can be found from the stars downwards.

Next comes an intriguing provocation. He notes that rich are prone to idleness and hence vulnerable to melancholy in contrast to the poor who are never ideal and thus invulnerable to melancholy. It could be argued that in contemporary Britain it is not the very richest people who are inactive but the very poorest. Unemployment, inactivity and depression appear to sit together as an unfortunate set in some cases.

I love the term ‘gargarized’. I believe people should use it more and attempt to do so myself whenever possible.

Finally, I never tire of hearing Craig reel off his great long list of recommended pastimes. It’s amazing what we used to do to divert ourselves before the invention of the television or computer screen. Anyone for quintain?

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This is one of the series lighter episodes. It is encouraging to learn that we can ‘rectify’ air in order to cure our melancholy and amusing to hear Sutton Coldfield getting name checked for great air and slagged off that the same time. It’s heartwarming to hear Oldbury also getting a shout out, and not slagged off. There is a hilariously elaborate nod towards one of his patrons whose estate apparently has great air.

Initially it is discouraging to hear Burton extolling the value of travel to fight off melancholy when we are unable to travel. Staying at home has been making many of us melancholy, so it’s good to hear tips on how to improve the air in our ‘chambers’ and how even looking out of our windows may bring us some relief.

This resourcefulness in home improvement makes sense, for although the author’s book roams around the world in its quotations the author wether by choice or lack of opportunity ‘never travelled but in map or card’.

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Now, early in the second partition, we start to return to the causes of melancholy set out in the first partition but with recommendations for cures. Where before we heard mostly of food to avoid here we are recommended ‘spoon meat’ and learn how often and how much we should eat in order to be cured. There are also some recommendations on the ‘art’ of going to the toilet if you haven’t been all day.

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In the last episode we cleared up the fact that it is okay to ask a doctor to treat you. In this pragmatic episode we learn how to be good patients. Now we are looked after by the National Health Service we are unlikely to be in the position of ‘shopping around’ for a medic, but in 17th Century England you had to pay your doctor yourself and so it is easy to imagine the tensions Robert Burton suggests arise between doctor and patient.

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This episode is a fantastic time capsule. It takes us back to a time when we might consider approaching a wizard for their advice with out troubles, of course this is discouraged in The Anatomy Of Melancholy. In fact, as the author is a protestant minister, even praying to Saints is discouraged as folly followed by the ‘papists’ – Jesus Christ is after all our ‘one mediator and advocate’ with God the Father.

Intriguingly at this time there was still an argument to be had as to whether it was heretical to go to a doctor for help. Does approaching a human to cure you betray your lacking of faith in God to sort you out? Perhaps his plan is for you to be ill and you would be undoing this plan by getting yourself cured, who knows? Robert Burton reassures us that so long as we use both strategies in tandem we are probably not going to go far wrong. He continues to explain that medicine can’t be an abomination as Jesus used dirt and spit when healing a blind man, which, though not entirely hygienic, does count as medicine.

Of course debates between faith and the medical intervention are still active. We argue about medical intervention in the inception, extension and termination of life human. We fret about the power of modern genetics to alter future generations and an individual’s religious faith may still prevent them from agreeing to treatments such as blood transfusions and organ transplants. There doesn’t seem to be a great resurgence of Wizards offering advice, but that may just be a question of definition, who else will recommend you use ‘healing crystals’ or ‘reiki stones’?

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This is a tough episode as it deals with suicide as the consequence of melancholy. Burton, the vicar, sets out in no uncertain terms the doctrinal position that suicide is a terrible sin, worse even than murder, for in killing themselves the perpetrator ‘kills their own soul’. However, as is often the case, having set out a harsh position Burton continues and displays considerable sympathy and compassion. Ultimately we cannot know other people’s troubles and what is happening in their minds, it is not our place to judge, we should leave that to God and He, knowing all, may choose to show mercy on a soul in torment.

I love this episode, it mixes theology with great compassion.

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The Anatomy Of Melancholy was written to be read by both women and men. Mostly it doesn’t distinguish between the genders, though of course if the activities under discussion have a gender imbalance then the advice will itself be reflect this. Occasionally however women and men are separated out has having their own distinct relationship with melancholy. In Episode 3 we learnt that men are more subject to melancholy but women, if they do suffer from it, suffer more acutely. Menstruation plays an important role, we are after all much concerned with bodily fluids, including blood, its retention and evacuation. You will be pleased to learn we have left phlebotomy out of this adaptation – along with trepanning!

This episode is devoted specifically to women and one of the subtleties of the stage adaptation we have lost here is that in on stage Rochi was dressed as a man, as if she had infiltrated the scholarly fraternity in disguise. In that version she bursts out with these thoughts and then, as if realising she may have blown her cover, backs down apologising, claiming to be a bachelor leading a monastic life. It’s all original Burton text, just distributed in a different way.

I love this episode’s closing section, which is about as animated and forceful as Burton gets in the whole book. He rants about the awful acts that follow on from enforced celibacy in what seems a very personal way and more or less threatens to see those imposing these rules outside in the car park – ‘let the politicians, the physicians and the theologians look out. I shall more opportunely meet with them elsewhere’.

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Dramatising this book for the stage wasn’t easy. We adopted numerous strategies one of which was occasionally to have each of the four actors personify one of the four humours – in a non-naff way.

Traces of that approach can be found in this episode, where we learn how melancholy manifests itself in the behaviour of individuals whose conditions are brought on by an imbalance in each of the four humours. This leads to a petty squabble over whose humour is ‘coolest’, or associated with the most notable figures from history.

Later we see enacted the peculiar tale of ‘an advocate of Paris’. Burton relates this far fetched story as evidence for the effects of ‘melancholy itself adust’ and yet immediately afterwards notes that it is fraom a play. For us this appears to be a clash between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ but Mary Ann Lund, from the University of Leicester, reassures us that this division wasn’t so sharp in Burton’s days. Medics would write books describing cases they’d treated alongside those they’d heard tell of. Such notes from famous medics were often published and Burton quotes from them liberally. Such tales may not have entirely met the standards of our British Medical Journal.

Love Melancholy fills much of the book’s third partition (which we don’t take on in this series, but did in our play). Lots of ‘evidence’ Burton uses in his study of Love Melancholy is drawn from works of fiction but again Mary Ann defends him, if as Burton believes melancholy is in part a disease of the imaginatio,n why shouldn’t it be studied using imaginative sources?

There is a certain sense to line of argument I suppose, authors reflect on the human experience of love and use that as the basis for writing their fiction, thus lived ‘truth’ and ‘written’ fiction are comingled. However, this approach does bring to mind Freud referencing classical mythology alongside his own case studies and I’ve long thought this works to be absolute hokum.

A non-captioned version can be seen here.

Helpfully here, in the first of three episodes focusing on the symptoms of melancholy, Robert Burton gives us an easy guide to help us identify people who are suffering from the complaint, either from their appearance or from their behaviour.

As often happens when digesting The Anatomy Of Melancholy I start this episode thinking “this is crackers” and conclude thinking “actually he’s probably got a point there”. I start by laughing, childishly, at the term ‘flaggy beard’. The notion of identifying someone as melancholic because of he state of their beard strikes me as absurd. Later I revisit the assertion and grudgingly admit that, if someone has given up shaving or given up trimming their beard there’s a good chance they’ve given up caring what they look like, due to melancholia. You may argue that the bearded man is a hipster and thus not truly melancholic, but surely any hipster whose beard is dismissed as ‘flaggy’ would be necessity be miserable. Burton’s point is proved.

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As acknowledged earlier, we are now open to ideas that the health of our bodies may effect the health of our minds, but we are perhaps less comfortable with the idea that poor mental health may be linked more specifically to our stomach, our spleen or the temperature of our liver – be that too hot or cold. I urge you to put that scepticism to one side for now, the glory of this episode lies in the imagery of its language, the ‘purly hunter’, the ’cask’ and its ‘tincture’ and the stunning conclusion, a sobering warning for those who think melancholy is something that only happens to other people.

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As we approach the end of Robert Burton’s great survey of melancholy’s causes, which together form Section 2 of the the first Partition of his Anatomy, we find the material for today’s episode.

After six sub-sections describing in detail examples of accidental causes – things that happen to us – he has a host of circumstances still to be addressed and so forms them into a concluding list. The list is touching because it is all so familiar to us, close to home and timeless. If we have not experienced a misery arising from an item on this list then we each surely know a family member, friend or acquaintance who has. The exception appears to be ‘Bad Servants’ but translate this to our times as ‘Employees’ and define these as ‘people you pay to do jobs for you’ then who hasn’t felt this gloom?

Hearing this list performed summons in me a pleasurable melancholy that Burton acknowledges, and is tolerant of, but urges us not to indulge in ‘overmuch’. So, if like me you find yourself seduced by the sad beauty of this episode, please don’t re-watch it too many times.