This version is captioned, a non-captioned version can be seen here.

The material for this conclusion to our series is taken from the end of Robert Burton’s introduction where be both justifies and apologises for his work.

In one of my favourite moments there is a suggestion that he find it a bit embarrassing and vulgar not to have done the whole thing in Latin. His publishers wouldn’t permit that approach and theirs was a wise choice. Elsewhere Burton has explained how he has kept the work practical by avoiding ‘fustian phrases’ and ‘hyperbolical exornations’. This book wasn’t an affectation to grace rich libraries, it was a book written to be read and to be useful. Although its dimensions meant it was expensive The Anatomy Of Melancholy sold well and was reprinted in a series of expanding editions through Burton’s life and remains in print today.

The book’s humour, generosity, peculiarity and practicality must all have contributed to its enduring appeal, as must the continuing prevalence of its subject matter. Through the series we have learnt many practical approaches to avoiding melancholy, which seem as sensible now as they did four hundred years ago and when forcing himself to boil his 1500 page effort to a single maxim our guide leaves us with a simple twined imperative, “be not solitary, be not idle”.

At the time of making this series many millions of people around the world were forced to separate themselves from others and cease their regular activities. It has been a time of melancholy, but just as in the Episode 1 Robert Burton told us he wrote this book about melancholy in order to avoid being melancholy, so making this series has kept its makers from the same ‘feral plague’.

We hope that you have found some consolation in these 35 extracts and direct you to their source, but if you choose to read either our stage adaptation or the primary text we urge you to do so only in moderation, a little each day, in a well lit room with good air.

This version is captioned, a non-captioned version can be found here.

You may have thought that cures through sleep had been fully dealt with in Episode 26, but those approaches were all about the physical context in which sleep can be ‘procured’, this episode, in line with Episode 33, takes a medicinal approach. Here are things to imbibe, smell or apply. In short, these are the pre-cursors of our sleeping pills. None of them are easily sourced today, though if you have a compliant pet obtaining the earwax of a dog may not be beyond you.

This version is captioned, a non-captioned version can be found here.

This episode contains a detailed recipe for a dish of ram’s brain that will cure melancholy. It is a passage I once used when explaining to the uninitiated how The Anatomy Of Melancholy mixes credible advice with crazy seventeenth century nonsense. However, since talking to a neuroscientist last year I’ve had to abandon this approach. He considered the cure not to be totally beyond the bounds of possibility. His reasoning was that if our melancholic had low serotonin levels and the ram’s brain contained serotonin then eating the brain could help, provided it were cooked gently and the serotonin survived the stomach’s acids.

I enjoy being taken to a world in which coffee is just an exotic rumour, being so drunk you vomit is recommended once a month and drug called Bang puts its adherents into a state of ecstasy. Much of this comes as a welcome contrast to the author’s familiar promotion of moderation as the best policy.

So far no one has stepped forward to persuade me that I’ll be cheered up by having hot ram’s lungs applied to my forehead. Surely that is crazy seventeenth century nonsense, but then maybe we shouldn’t dismiss anything without trying it out.

This version is captioned, a non-captioned version can be seen here.

This episode weighs up the merits of using medicines to cure melancholy and there is much to enjoy here.

Initially Robert Burton shares with us his cautious scepticism, after all there is an ‘accurate description’ of people who live an extraordinary span of years in Iceland by entirely avoiding the medical profession. He backs this argument up with a macabre joke about the relative dangers of treatment by physicians or pharmacists before conducting a witty retreat to ensure he doesn’t alienate those may later have to call on for help.

A concern about side effects leads to caution about too ready or lavish a prescription of medicines, a caution which remains with us today.

There is a brilliant cutting down to size of ‘bombast physicians’ (a phrase I am constantly looking to adapt for everyday use). Their cures, which now sound like ‘alternative medicine’, Burton characterises as ‘prodigious, sumptuous, far-fetched, rare [and] conjectural’. One wonders what the few known common garden herbs’ were used by ‘many an old wife or country woman’.