Cultural Depictions of Meloncholy

Check out this BBC Radio 4 programme about Robert Burton’s sprawling encyclopedic analysis of the ‘epidemic of the time’. Written in the seventeenth century, The Anatomy Of Meloncholia draws on the classics, literature, medicine and a multitude of quotes to delve into the area of what we now refer to as depression. Here’s an article in the Lancet Meloncholy, Medicine and the Arts. Below is the frontispiece to the original edition, and at the end is that famous print entitled Meloncholia by Albrecht Dürer.

BBC and Lancet links via Morbid Anatomy