The armamentarium of sixteenth- and seventeenth century medicine against melancholy was vast. The section on cures in the 1632 edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is almost 200 pages long, and includes, besides dietary and lifestyle recommendations, the following modes of treatment: fomentations, cataplasms, plasters, liniments, ointments, averters, clysters, inunctions, odoraments, electuaries, masticatories, frontlets, unguents, dropaces, lenitives, ligatures, cordials, cupping, cautery, irrigations, blood-letting, and leeches. He devotes a chapter to music as “a sovereigne Remedy against Despaire and Melancholy.” And then there is this exotic beverage:

The Turkes have a drinke called Coffa…so named of a berry as blacke as soot, and as bitter…they spend much time in those Coffa-houses, which are somewhat like our Alehouses and Tavernes, and there they sit chatting and drinking to drive away the time, and to bee merry together, because they finde by experience that kinde of drinke so used helpeth digestion, and procureth alacrity.

These are allopathic treatments, they cancel out the disease, as it were, by their opposite nature. For himself, however, Burton found that the homeopathic method worked best. As we will see, he buried himself in the lifelong study of melancholy, thereby making, as he put it, an “Antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease.”

From 'Melancholiana' by Democritus Nepos

It has been argued that the sudden appearance of autobiographical writing in Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries was a result of the diffusion of high-quality glass mirrors. Before then, most people knew what they looked like only from their imperfect reflection in water or window glass or pocket mirrors of polished metal or stone. The only glass mirror in common use was the convex ‘sorcerer’s eye,’ familiar from Van Eyck’s wedding picture and Parmigianino’s self-portrait. Then, sometime in the 16th century, Venetian glass-makers perfected a technique to coat one side of sheet glass with an amalgam of tin and mercury to produce flat mirrors of unprecedented size and fineness. The difference between the experience of seeing yourself in a pocket-sized, likely somewhat tarnished metal mirror held unsteadily in your hand and that of seeing yourself in a large, flat, perfectly clear glass mirror hung on a wall is not to be underestimated. Like other optical instruments invented or perfected around the same time—the microscope and the telescope—the glass mirror opened a new perspective on the world. The present ubiquity of mirrors makes it hard to appreciate how revelatory (and unsettling) it must have been to encounter one’s image in a ‘looking glass’ for the first time. It was as if you had spent your life looking out at the world from the window of a house you never left, then one day you are suddenly confronted by a view of the house’s facade with you looking at yourself from the window (of your eyes). Before, your consciousness was the center, the vantage point from which you experienced the world through the apertures of your senses. At a stroke, the mirror divides you in two: your consciousness and this thing in front of you. For the first time you are the center of your consciousness’ focus, but you are simultaneously removed from the center, becoming another thing to be looked at, one more item in the inventory of the world. It is of course paradoxical that the experience of seeing yourself clearly for the first time with great fidelity was disenthroning. It is something like the Copernican discovery that the universe does not revolve around the earth, enlarging our knowledge of the universe, but diminishing our stature in it.

Melancholiana by Democritus Nepos

Melancholiana

The other day a friend said to me, apropos of nothing, that she would be happy “if it weren’t for something-or-other.” It was the kind of remark that would seem to call for an explanation, but I didn’t need one; I knew all too well what she was talking about. I knew, too, that she and I were not the first to encounter this mysterious ‘something-or-other,’ nor the first to be at a loss for a name to give it. Shakespeare, I am sure, was thinking of it when he had one of his queens complain of a “nameless woe.” Matthew Arnold similarly describes being overcome by a “nameless sadness.” An early English dictionary noted that when people are troubled but “know not where their own grief lies, or what ayls them,” they say they have the Je-ne-sais-quoi, the ‘I-don’t-know-what.’

From the book 'Melancholiana'