ABSTRACT
Disease is an 'affection of the body contrary to nature', an ill habit that dissolves 'that league' which joins bodies to souls: what disease is, writes Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, 'almost every Physician defines'. The author begins with Sir Thomas Elyot on the non-naturals and offer a brief history of the term; then he focuses on anger as a prime example of moral nosology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Nicholas de Coeffeteau writes, he explores the physiology of anger below but, for now, we should recognise that anger is 'accompanied' by burnt or superabundant choler, and occasioned by real or imagined slights and wrongs, contempt and misdeeds. Mooring distemper and illness, disease and affliction, to the passions evidences a dominant 'style of thinking' about disease in early modern Europe. As Charles Rosenberg has argued, "disease categories represent a microcosm of and metaphor for the constraining social world.
