The Psychiatry of Robert Burton: By Bergen Evans in consultation with George J. Mohr, M.D. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944. 129 pp.

For over three hundred years Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy has been entirely neglected by psychiatrists. In the medical profession it has received recognition from only two individuals. Sir William Osler became deeply interested in Burton, his library and his Anatomy. Of the Anatomy he said, 'No book of any

language presents such a stage of moving pictures'.1 Osler, because of his clinical and scholarly ability, could appreciate the Anatomy but, lacking psychiatric training, he was unable to formulate its worth by modern psychological methods. He sensed that Burton, although not a medical man himself, had made a contribution to medical science which should give him a niche among his contemporaries, Sydenham and Harvey. Osler's plea that the Anatomy be seriously considered as a psychiatric treatise was ignored. In 1936 Dr. Joseph Miller of Chicago published a short article on Burton in which he stressed the value of the Anatomy. It remained, however, for Bergen Evans in consultation with Dr. George J. Mohr to put the Anatomy in its rightful place as a great psychiatric treatise and to evaluate it in the light of psychodynamic psychiatry. There is one obvious explanation for the neglect of the Anatomy by psychiatrists. The book itself is so burdened with quotations, stories, mythology and historical comments that the reading of it is difficult in the extreme. However, there may be still another reason for the failure of psychiatrists to recognize the Anatomy. Could it be that the narcissism of the medical man made him loath to give credit to a layman for a medical discovery?

We can be grateful to the authors for their culling out Burton's observations on the symptoms, theories of the causes, and suggestions for the treatment of Melancholia. The book, although only one hundred and twenty-nine pages in length, contains a wealth of material in its chapters on