To find a coherent account of normal and abnormal psychology from within Burton’s religious presuppositions and humoral explanations requires selection and interpretation. This reading highlights Burton’s stress on the role of the imagination in inciting and averting melancholy; his emphasis on daily habits of thought in engendering, as well as avoiding, severe disorder; the multidirectional feedback loops linking feeling and thought in his particular version of embodied interactionism; and the centrality of symptoms, natural history and habituation in his conception of disease. Much of the An ... More

To find a coherent account of normal and abnormal psychology from within Burton’s religious presuppositions and humoral explanations requires selection and interpretation. This reading highlights Burton’s stress on the role of the imagination in inciting and averting melancholy; his emphasis on daily habits of thought in engendering, as well as avoiding, severe disorder; the multidirectional feedback loops linking feeling and thought in his particular version of embodied interactionism; and the centrality of symptoms, natural history and habituation in his conception of disease. Much of the Anatomy comes from classical, medieval, and renaissance writing, yet it yields an account that concurs well with present-day cognitivism. Although with its signature fears and sadnesses seventeenth-century melancholy bears only a loose relationship to present-day mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, on this reading, the Anatomy anticipates important present-day findings and hypotheses, including psychiatry’s network models of depression; the part played by affective states and imagination (or simulation) in all cognition, and links between “melancholising” or rumination, and affective disorder. The Anatomy of Melancholy offers a host of recommendations for averting, and remedying, melancholy as disease, and its emphasis on early prevention, eclectic, multifactorial treatments, and consistent self-care are traceable to its underlying cognitive architecture and disease conception. Averted early through adherence to the regimen of Galenic medicine with its six “nonnaturals” that together regulate the passions, it suggests, severe, intractable melancholy can mostly be avoided. It a progressive disorder engendered by neglected cognitive and behavioral habits, so prevention largely lies in attentive self-care—a conception, and conclusion, with likely implications for psychiatry today.