Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) is a book by Robert Burton, first published in 1621,[1] but republished five more times over the next seventeen years with massive alterations and expansions.
On its surface, the book is presented as a medical textbook in which Burton applies his vast and varied learning, in the scholastic manner, to the subject of melancholia (or clinical depression).
Anatomy uses melancholy as a lens through which all human emotion and thought may be scrutinized, and virtually the entire contents of a 17th-century library are marshalled into service of this goal.
[citation needed] In addition to the author's techniques, the Anatomy's vast breadth – addressing topics such as digestion, goblins, the geography of America, and others[2] – make it a valuable contribution to multiple disciplines.
And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it.
[2] Admirers of The Anatomy of Melancholy range from Samuel Johnson,[11] Holbrook Jackson (whose Anatomy of Bibliomania [1930] was based on the style and presentation), George Armstrong Custer, Charles Lamb and John Keats (who said it was his favourite book) to Northrop Frye, Stanley Fish, Anthony Powell, Philip Pullman,[12] Cy Twombly, Jorge Luis Borges (who used a quote as an epigraph to his story "The Library of Babel"), O. Henry (William Sidney Porter), William Gass (who wrote the Introduction to the NYRB Classics 2001 reprint), Nick Cave, Samuel Beckett,[13] Ansgar Allen (whose Burton's Anatomy was produced by deleting more than half a million words from Burton's manuscript),[14] and Jacques Barzun (who sees it anticipating 20th-century psychiatry).
[17][18] Sterne also mocked Burton's divisions in the titles of his chapters, and parodied his grave and sober account of Cicero's grief for the death of his daughter Tullia.