Burton’s 400-year-old work may be based in long-outmoded medical theories, but pulsates with wit, humanity and energy A 17th-century prose text peppered with Latin and Greek quotations, based on an ancient medical system entirely superseded by modern science – and clocking in, in its new 400th anniversary edition, at a mighty 1,376 pages – sounds impossibly forbidding. It is true that Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, the first edition of which was published in 1621, is not for the faint of heart. But there is a good reason why Penguin Classics is reissuing it next week; why Laurence Sterne stole chunks of it for Tristram Shandy; why it was a favourite of Samuel Johnson’s (“the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise”, according to Boswell); why Jorge Luis Borges borrowed from it an epigraph to his great short story, The Library of Babel; why Anthony Burgess called it “one of the great comic works of the world”. This is a work that, as the novelist Philip Pullman has pointed out, contains enormous humanity, wit and common sense; one, above all, that vibrates with energy and life. Born in 1577, Burton was a cleric and fellow at Oxford who worked in the library at Christ Church. He himself was a sufferer from melancholy, he wrote. It is a disorder that modern readers would probably define as depression, but in his own time – when William Harvey was just beginning to conduct research that would transform understanding of the workings of the human body – the condition was seen in relation to the theory of the four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm) that had persisted, thanks to the writings of Galen, since antiquity. Continue reading...
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