The Essential Anatomy of Melancholy
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About this book
English churchman and scholar Robert Burton (15761639) was a passionate student of medicine history literature and science the whole of human knowledge. He was also a witty pedantic and eloquent genius who devoted the major part of his life to writing The Anatomy of Melancholy one of the richest most inexhaustible books in the English language. Ostensibly an elaborately systematized medical treatise dealing with various morbid mental states their causes symptoms and cures the Anatomy is much more: a compendium of memorable utterances on the human condition in general compiled from classical scholastic and contemporary sources. For this edition the editors carefully selected those passages containing the most psychological and general interest eliminating a good deal of nonessential material but retaining the incomparable wit eccentric charm imagination and richness of thought of the original. In short readers will find here the essence of Burtons vast book the passages which according to W. H. D. Rouse reveal the authors "eternal freshness his own ingenuous interest and his boyish delight in a good story."
