The Anatomy of Melancholy

At times I laughed and scoffed with Lucian, exposed faults through satire with Menippus, or lamented with Heraclitus. At other times I was “a scoffer with a mischievous spleen”; then again, “bile burned my liver.” I was deeply stirred by abuses I could not remedy.

However much I may share those feelings with him or with them, that is not why I conceal myself beneath his name. I do it either to gain a little more liberty and freedom of speech under an unfamiliar disguise, or, if you insist on knowing, for the single reason Hippocrates describes at length in his letter to Damegetus. He relates that, visiting Democritus one day, he found him in his garden on the outskirts of Abdera, beneath a shady bower, with a book on his knees, absorbed in study, sometimes writing, sometimes walking.

His book concerned melancholy and madness. Around him lay the carcasses of many different animals, which he had recently cut open and dissected. As he told Hippocrates, this was not from contempt for God's creatures, but to discover the seat of this “black bile,” or melancholy: where it came from and how it was generated in human bodies. He intended thereby to cure it more effectively in himself and, through his writings and observations, teach others how to prevent and avoid it.

Hippocrates warmly praised this good intention. Democritus Junior therefore ventures to imitate him and, since he left the work unfinished and it is now lost, to revive, pursue, and complete it in this treatise, “as Democritus's stand-in.”

You have heard my reason for the name. If the title and its wording offend your sense of seriousness, I could produce many sober treatises—even sermons—with more fanciful names on their title pages, if pointing to others were a sufficient defence. In any case, these days a fanciful title is a way of helping a book sell.

For, as larks descend into a net set by day, many frivolous readers will stop and stare, like foolish passers-by, at a grotesque picture in a painter's shop, though they will not look at a work of sound judgement. Indeed, as Scaliger observes, nothing attracts a reader more than an unexpected, unthought-of subject, and nothing sells better than a scurrilous pamphlet, “especially when novelty excites the palate.”