Melancholy, Phrensie, and Madnesse, Oh My!
In the 1600’s, Robert Burton wrote Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, to describe illnesses such as “phrensie,” “madnesse,” and lycanthropia or “wolfe madnesse.” Melancholy was defined by Burton as an illness that “goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, feare, griefe, passion, perturbation of the mid, any matter of care, discontent, or thought […]
