If there was ever a literal way to describe the essence of my blog title, Gay as Paint, the following 400 year old cure for depression would surely be it.
In 1621 a doctor named Robert Burton published the Anatomy of Melancholia, a 9,000 page tome that sought to define the disorder, to seek "What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, (sic) Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up"
Burton defined his subject as follows:
"Melancholy, the subject of our present
discourse, is either in disposition or in habit. In disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, (sic) heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing forwardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality… This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed."
In the dandified vernacular befitting Oscar Wilde, he prescribed the following four remedies to treat it.
Seek merry company
Play at honest amusements
Dress Gaily
Haunt light and lovely places
