Caspar Henderson

Why the first self-help book is still worth reading: The Anatomy of Melancholy anatomised

Mary Ann Lund’s User’s Guide helps us appreciate why Robert Burton’s great doorstopper on madness remains so revered

‘A surgery where all fantasy and follies are purged and good qualities prescribed.’ Line engraving by M. Greuter c. 1600. Credit: Wellcome Collection

Footling around on the internet recently, I stumbled on a clip of a young woman singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ to a full-grown cow. As she sat cross-legged, strumming away not very well on a guitar, the cow lay down beside her and gently nudged her with its huge head as adoringly as any puppy. The sight brought to mind a passage in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in which he reflects on music as a remedy:

Harts, hinds, horses, dogs, bears are exceedingly delighted with it; elephants, Agrippa adds; and in Lydia in the midst of a lake there be certain floating islands (if ye will believe it), that after music will dance.

Wonderful craziness like this, which accommodates both the plausible and the beyond-belief in a spirit of generosity and delight, is characteristic of Burton’s great work; and it may go a little way to answering the question of why one should bother with a 400-year-old text about some of the darkest corners of human experience. It is framed in an understanding of medicine and the human body that has long since been debunked — and at half a million words, and more than 500 pages, is, even in paperback, so heavy as to be almost unpickupable.

You don’t have to take my word for it. The Anatomy is widely acclaimed as a classic. Laurence Sterne stole chunks from it for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Samuel Johnson said it was the only book that got him out of bed early just to read it. Keats adored it. Borges’s Library of Babel is prefaced with lines from it. Samuel Beckett was a fan, and Anthony Burgess thought it one of the great comic works of the world.

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