Melancholy is an ‘epidemicall’ disease, Burton says, noting the multitude of causes which, along with human wickedness and inherent humoral imbalances, explain the extensive and increasing suffering he observes around him. His observations tell us little about seventeenth-century epidemiology, I argue. Moreover, the meanings accorded to seemingly familiar terms such as ‘disease’, ‘symptom’, and ‘epidemic’ rest on assumptions that leave them orthogonal to today’s standard etiological medical assumptions. Yet they find resonance within recent broad theorizing about the concept of disease, in public health emphases and alternative medicine, as well as in the larger health culture of our times.

Chapter 4 goes along with Borges’s reading of a dynastic translational spectrum of anxieties. A forum for discussion initiated by Galland has been involving a worldwide cultural scene with anxieties that are expressed in reeditions, abridgments, authentication processes, claims to fidelity to an original, though disputed, text, and unexpurgated or collated editions. The discussions erupted since the advent of Galland’s Thousand and One Nights set the scene on fire: accusations and counter charges over three centuries signify the existence of the Nights in world culture as a knowledge consortium that brings on board theories of translation, cultural interventions, and conversations and discussions among the most prominent intellectuals, artists, and fiction writers. Illustrators, film industry producers and directors have been participating in this dynasty, simply because they are part of one translation or another, though on certain occasions they stand on their own. If political dynasties of rulers are often biologically related, the Nights in Europe has its textual dynasty: no translator or editor could ever get free from Galland’s enterprise, not even Muhsin Mahdi who produced Galland’s Arabic manuscript after only portions of it appeared in print early on in the twentieth century. More important is the fact that the Nights was once a platform in the ongoing racial philological divide in language families, Aryan and Semite. New philology found in the Nights a viable means to discuss origins. The divide did not die, and it is reborn in stock images, value judgments, and essentialisms.