Before Depression
1660 - 1800
'Melancholy and the Talking Cure in the Sixteenth Century'
Professor Jenny Richards (University of Newcastle)
In sixteenth-century England there were two prevailing explanations
for melancholy: a medical theory that emphasised humoral imbalance
and a moral explanation that stressed the role of turbulent emotions.
Consequently, treatments for melancholy included well-established
medical therapies - such as regimen and purgation - but also, more
controversially, moral philosophy. Moral physic could take several
forms: participation in merry and 'honest' company or in formal prayers,
but also, as Thomas Elyot advises in A Castle of Healthe (1539), reflection
on the 'holsome counsayles founde in holy scripture, and in the bokes
of morall doctrine'.
This paper is concerned with this last kind of therapy which emphasised
the relationship between mental and corporeal health. My argument
develops from the recent work of historians who are re-evaluating
the place of morality in early modern medicine. I will argue that
moral philosophy is understood as an empowering therapy for melancholics
in the sixteenth century partly because it liberates a sufferer from
the tyranny of the body and the physician. Most importantly, though,
it is empowering because it provides a sufferer with the rhetorical
resources to understand his or her condition and to reintegrate into
society. Moral philosophy is not just a series of tenets - e.g. be
temperate and patient. It is also a process of reasoning that is dialogic
in form. Indeed, as I will suggest, there is a crucial relationship
between this therapeutic innovation in humanist medicine and the growing
concern with 'dialogue' as a therapy for the social-political ills
of the body politic. This constitutes an early modern 'talking cure'.