THE ONE MINUTE CURE REVIEWS FULL
It’s the last full expression of the pre-modern world.” Dr Johnson – a depressive who once told a friend, “When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking” – called The Anatomy of Melancholy “the only book that ever took me out of bed two hours sooner than I wished to rise”. Yet if The Anatomy of Melancholy was necessarily a failure, it is a magnificent one – an attempted encyclopaedia of all human feeling, by one of the greatest stylists in the English language.Īs Philip Pullman put it, “This vast attic of a book is the strangest, funniest, and most consoling work I know. The irony, of course, is that 400 years later, we can put a man on the moon, but we still don’t know why people get depressed, or even (with British GPs being asked this week not to prescribe so many antidepressant pills) how best to treat it.
Why shouldn’t Burton, with the scalpel of his wit, a melancholy soul on the operating table, and the vast accumulated testimony of literature, make similar leaps in demystifying the psyche? Whereas it “so crucifies” other scientists, he says, to “find out the quadrature of a circle, the creeks and sounds of the north-east, or north-west passages perfect the motion of Mars and Mercury”, how hard can it be to understand “the state of own souls”? Great assaults on human ignorance were being made by his peers across Europe: Kepler with his telescope had discovered the laws of planetary motion Cardano with his dice was laying the foundations of probability theory Harvey was making the case for the circulation of the blood. There is not greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business.” In writing it, he likens himself to “that virtuous Lady of old”, who, being a leper, left all her money “to build an Hospital for Lepers”.īurton’s ambition – “to anatomize… this our Microcosmus” – was not obviously a foolish one.
When Prince Harry says “End the stigma”, it is as if the ghost of Burton speaks through him: “Give me but a little leave, and you shall see… most men are mad.”īurton confides that he himself is “not a little offended with this malady” – and that his book helps him keep it at bay: “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. It was, he hoped, for “the common good”: after all, he asks, “Who is not brainsick?” Melancholy is “ an inbred malady in every one of us”, “a disease so frequent… as few there are that feel not the smart of it”. So wrote Robert Burton, an Oxford scholar of theology (“a divine”, as he put it), in The Anatomy of Melancholy – now out in Penguin Classics for its 400th anniversary – his astonishing life’s work, in which he grapples with what we would call depression (“my mistress Melancholy”), dividing it into parts and pinning down their causes and cures. Slip back four centuries to 1621, and you find the same complaint: “If our leg or arm offend us, we covet by all means possible to redress it and if we labour of a bodily disease, we send for a physician but for the diseases of the mind we take no notice of them.” Now Noah has to race against time to protect the one thing that can save his daughter's life as the chase turns into a symphony of ultraviolent action filled with vehicular carnage,adrenaline-fueled gunfights, brutal hand-to-hand combat, and lots, and lots of explosions.“All I would like, really, is to live in a world where people with broken minds are treated as seriously as people with broken legs,” wrote Bryony Gordon in this newspaper in 2017. On top of this, the covert government organization that hired Noah might also have ulterior motives for the cure. When a permanent cure is stolen from a top-secret lab by a mysterious terrorist organization,Noah is recruited to retrieve it and ultimately save his daughter's life.What starts as an already dangerous mission turns into a deathtrap when the terrorists' bring fifteen armored vehicles filled with a hundred trained killer armed to the teeth with assault rifles, grenades, and even a rocket launcher. There is no permanent cure, only a temporary serum that resets every 24 hours.Special forces mercenary Noah's young daughter is one of the infected. In the near future, a mysterious virus has taken over a large portion of the world's population.Upon contamination, it kills the host within a day.