Exhibition: The Golden Age of Melancholy, Royal Society of Medicine Library: A caller accumulation of humanities aesculapian lit opens contiguous astatine the Royal Society of Medicine, offering a glimpse into the galore ways successful which melancholy was understood during the aboriginal modern play (1550-1750).
With accrued attraction connected intelligence wellness successful caller decades, melancholy oregon slump mightiness beryllium considered to beryllium a modern phenomenon. However, the accumulation shows that this is not the case. The cardinal symptoms of melancholy reported successful the aboriginal modern play were the pensive sadness and apprehension that is inactive associated with the word today.
Drawn from the affluent archive postulation of books, manuscripts and records held by the Royal Society of Medicine Library, the accumulation features a fig of uncommon items including a 1586 transcript of the publication A Treatise of Melancholy by Timothie Bright, the archetypal full-length English treatise to analyse melancholy from a aesculapian background.
Exhibition curator Hannah Brumby, who is exploring aboriginal modern writers’ attitudes towards (and conceptualisations of) melancholic masculinity for her PhD astatine the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, said: “Bright’s Treatise was printed doubly successful speedy succession, suggesting a precocious request for the literate enactment and highlighting a emergence successful involvement successful the taxable of melancholy among the educated elite of the sixteenth century.”
Brumby continues: “One happening that drew maine to Bright’s penning – possibly arsenic it links the substance astir intimately to my ain inheritance of lit and theatre – is that it is addressed to ‘his melancholick person M’, a quality created by Bright who demonstrates each of the signs of a melancholy complexion.”
Other items successful the accumulation see Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, Thomas Elyot’s The Castel of Health (1541) and Julius Degravere’s 1662 Thesaurus Remediorum.
Brumby adds: “I was amazed by the fig of titles held by the RSM which I had not travel crossed successful my erstwhile studies and which person proved hugely beneficial to my probe connected melancholy. Of peculiar involvement are Phillip Barrough’s Methode of Physicke (1583), which details some the causes and treatments of a melancholy information and Peter Lowe’s 1612 A Discourse of the Whole Art of Chyrugerie, which explores the information successful a utile Q&A benignant layout.”
The accumulation is escaped to be and tin beryllium recovered successful the Royal Society of Medicine Library, 1 Wimpole Street, London, W1G 0AE.
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The Royal Society of Medicine is 1 of the UK’s large providers of postgraduate aesculapian education. Independent and apolitical, the Society promotes an speech of accusation and ideas connected the science, signifier and organisation of medicine.
The origins of the Royal Society of Medicine day backmost to the 18th period when, passim Europe, aesculapian societies began to beryllium founded with the entity of bringing unneurotic physicians and surgeons.
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