Burton, Robert (1577-1640). The anatomy of melancholy. What it is, with all the kinds causes, symptomes, prognostickes, & seuerall cures of it. In three partitions, with their severall sections, members & subsections. Philosophically, medicinally, historically, opened & cut up. By. Democritus Iunior. With a satyricall preface, conducing to the following discourse. The fourth edition, corrected and augmented by the author. Printed [by Leonard Lichfield] for Henry Cripps, Oxford, 1632.

Price: US$12500.00 + shipping

Condition: Fine

Description: Bound in attractive contemporary English calf (rebacked, with the majority of the original spine preserved), both boards richly and ornately tooled in gold with large central arabesques, roll-tooled compartments, and floral tools. Surface of the boards lightly rubbed, corners bumped, a few scrapes to the lower board. Modern endpapers. A very good, crisp copy, complete with the engraved title page depicting various types of melancholy and the explanatory "Argument of the Frontispiece". A small piece of the upper blank corner of the first leaf has been excised (not affecting the text.); outer edge of first leaf and engraved title chipped; edges of first few leaves lightly browned, blank corner of engraved t.p. with 17th c. ownership scored through and illegible; small rust holes in lvs. M3, Rr1 and Yy4; small loss to blank lower margin of leaf Cc2 (far from the text), tiny natural flaw in leaf Hh2, affecting 2 letters without loss of sense; verso of last leaf lightly soiled, blank recto of first leaf soiled. Light stain to first text leaf. "This great book was destined to become the most frequently reprinted psychiatric text. It may properly be called the first psychiatric encyclopedia for nearly one thousand authors are cited, about half of them medical. It was so popular that five editions appeared in Burton's lifetime and three more in the seventeenth century."(Hunter and Macalpine) "The one major product of [Robert Burton's] eccentric life was his 'Anatomy of Melancholy' (1621), a long and serious study of the causes, symptoms, and cures of the 'black distemper' from which, reportedly, the author himself suffered. The erudite Oxford scholar who never married or even traveled 'but in map or card' put all of his life in 'The Anatomy of Melancholy', a work so profusely documented with thousands of allusions to authors from Galen to Bacon as to suggest that for Burton the choicest part of living was reading. His treatise is systematically divided into three principal parts: causes, symptoms, and prognoses of melancholy; cures and alleviations of melancholy; and symptoms of love and religious melancholy, the two classic manifestations of the malady. Burton's' tripartite arrangement, however, does not prevent him from engaging in long digressions on human anatomy and the nature of spirits, observations on manners and morals, or descriptions of his own ideal commonwealth. For most readers, Burton's didactic or satiric anecdotes and well-placed allusions, however digressive, constitute one of the chief allurements of his book. Few readers have regretted the fact that although Burton was thoroughly conversant with Bacon and the 'new science,' and sympathetic to his aims, he could not resist imposing on every problem his own eccentric and restless imagination. Nor could he, for all his scientific values, overcome his peculiar conceptions of logic and his penchant for proving a case by the medieval method of totaling masses of authorities on either side of a given question." (James Ruoff in Crowell's Handbook of Elizabethan and Stuart Literature, pages 50-51) Samuel Johnson used the "Anatomy of Melancholy" in compiling his Dictionary. Boswell reports that Burton's was the only work that Johnson rose early in the morning to read with pleasure.

Seller: Liber Antiquus Early Books & Manuscripts, Chevy Chase, MD, U.S.A.