'Groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous System': Robert Burns and Melancholy

Many currents in eighteenth-century Scotland--philosoph- ical, literary, medical and religious--served to influence how the poet, Robert Burns, understood his disturbed moods and how he described them in his poetry and letters. By tracking the chronology of his illness and the particular medical language he and his biographers drew upon in relation to the nervous theories current in Scotland and the cult of Romantic sensibility, this chapter examines how Burns' melancholy reflected and was related to the culture and historical period in which he lived.