Melancholia

Abstract

An Extract from a Dissertation read before the Royal Medical Society on Friday, 27th January, 1961.

"Melancholy," meaning "black bile" or "black despair," designates aptly that spiritual blight which has vexed mankind from the earliest time. Playwrights and philosophers have long been intrigued by the spectacle of causeless melancholy, and, more recently, pathological melancholy, rechristened "psychotic depression" has been the subject of clinical definition.