How a 17th-century, fourteen-hundred-page medical textbook entitled The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and...
[more]How a 17th-century, fourteen-hundred-page medical textbook entitled The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up became one of New York Review Books Classics' bestsellers might seem utterly bewildering to anyone who hasn't ventured to read it; and even those who have might be perplexed by the extent of its success.
But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that something of such joy and life, of such exuberant prose and such invigoratingly searching thought, would garner so much attention. Burton is easy to like, as much for his style as for the perversity and thoroughness of some of his odder speculations and deductions. Indeed, perhaps only he could have made an investigation of melancholy so thoroughly delightful. Holbrook Jackson, in his introduction to the 1932 edition – included in the NYRB Classics edition –, remarks cannily that he "was a good-humoured pessimist, and unless he himself had told us we should not have guessed that he was addicted to melancholy." Indeed, the treatment is positively jolly in temperament; it is no wonder that such similarly joyful melancholiacs as Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Keats, among a great many others, include it among their favorite works. William Gass, that inveterate introduction-writer, sums up the appeal nicely in his introduction to the current edition: "Read a member a day," he suggests; "it will chase the gloom away."
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