Anna Katharina Schaffner

This book combines a number of my interests, including psychology, the history of medicine, and literature. The text focuses on the history of depression, neurasthenia, acedia, or melancholy, as it has been called throughout the ages. It covers some of the same ground as Scott Stossel's [b:My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind|17737025|My Age of Anxiety Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind|Scott Stossel|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1367929729s/17737025.jpg|24906873], only with literary allusions instead of personal anecdotes.
I appreciated the discussion of exhaustion in a historical and literary context, and was going to give this book five stars, until the part about ME. I'm no expert on the illness, but I felt that it was discussed in a rather dismissive tone. The stated purpose of the author was to describe types of exhaustion that aren't caused by a specific physical health issue, so the inclusion of chronic fatigue syndrome had problematic implications.
While there were many allusions to classic literature and philosophy, the book lacked the voices of contemporary suffers of conditions that can cause exhaustion. There was no mention of spoon theory, a concept which is surprisingly similar to Beard's nervous bankruptcy. I've often thought that there is nothing intuitive about using spoons as a measure of energy as opposed to say, batteries, but it's relatively timeless compared to the specific metaphors used in other eras.
Overall, I think this book would have been an excellent cultural history of exhaustion and depression up until the mid-twentieth century. The discussion of current manifestations of those conditions would have been better expanded or omitted.… (mere)