Mental illness was not necessarily any less common before the psychiatric age. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, describes nearly every condition known to present-day psychology. The full text is available online, and the section from which Ellwood reads in the play can be found here, where, after listing the symptoms of melancholy in young women and suggesting remedies (including, inevitably, marriage, “to give them content to their desires”), Burton concludes with a sympathetic acknowledgement of the intractability of depression:
I do not so much pity them that may otherwise be eased, but those alone that out of a strong temperament, innate constitution, are violently carried away with this torrent of inward humours, and though very modest of themselves, sober, religious, virtuous, and well given, (as many so distressed maids are,) yet cannot make resistance, these grievances will appear, this malady will take place, and now manifestly show itself, and may not otherwise be helped.
