Change of air
Now that I arrived in Stanford, ahead of the Digital Humanities 2011 conference, I remembered how Robert Burton once advised the change of air, or travelling, as a treatment for melancholy:
Although our ordinary air be good by nature or art, yet it is not amiss still to alter it; no better physick [medication] for a melancholy man than change of air and variety of places, to travel abroad and see fashions. (...) No man (...) can be such a stock or stone, whom that pleasant speculation of countries, cities, towns, rivers, will not affect. (...) For peregrination charmes our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety, that some count him unhappy that never travelled, a kind of prisoner, and pity his case, that from his cradle to his old age beholds the same still;
(Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Partition 2, Sect. 2, Member 3)
