Words of wisdom by Robert Burton, written centuries before our modern era in his 1621 tome, “The Anatomy of Melancholy.” In which he offered his view of how our bodies affect our emotion and exactly the sentiment that this blog shares.

About Richard Burton

Born in 1577 to a comfortably well-off family of the landed gentry, Burton inhabited the golden age of Renaissance anatomy, when Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings peered into the distant future of medicine. But medicine then was still as crude as a stone blade directed at the body, to the total exclusion of the mind. Psychology was not even a faint contour in humanity’s imagination. The birth of neuroscience was still three and a half centuries away. That Burton applied a term of physiology to the understanding of a psychology not yet born is already a staggering leap of the imagination.