Even if the medical concepts involved appear to be completely obsolete, the history of melancholy is of interest to a modern audience for at least two reasons. Melancholia was one of the cardinal forms of madness in earlier times, and its name and concept encapsulate the whole history of humoralism, since melancholia is black bile, one of the peccant humors recognized in Hippocratic and Galenic medicine that have counterparts in the classical system of Ayurvedic medicine in India. A study of humoral medicine that would be respectful of classical phrasings, philosophical tenets and technical concepts of scholarly medicine, might help the modern anthropologist and epistemologist of medicine to elaborate upon concepts currently in use, like somatization, illness as a culturally constructed experience of disease, etc., which have never been grounded on any knowledge of medical history. The history of melancholy is also important to understand the recent developments of cultural psychology. The history of melancholia is that of an innately human experience of suffering becoming the object of a cultural construct. As a mood or emotion, the experience of being melancholy or depressed is at the very heart of being human: feeling ``down or blue or unhappy, being dispirited, discouraged, disappointed, dejected, despondent, melancholy, depressed, or despairing many aspects of such affective experiences are within the normal range. Everyone suffers from this kind of metaphorical melancholia, as Robert Burton said, because ``Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality, that is, a figure of the human condition. To be melancholic or depressed is not necessarily to be mentally ill or in a pathological state. It is only with greater degrees of severity or longer durations when dispositions are transformed into habits as Burton would say that such affective states come to be viewed as pathological. On choosing to focus on melancholy as a clinical condition, we are faced with the issue of whether it is a disease or some other sort of assemblage of signs and symptoms. But we can rely on the very rich historiography of the theme in literature and philosophy, starting with the Letters of Hippocrates.
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 13:37:11 +0000
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