The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1577-1640) is a curious assemblage of information and speculation about the human condition as viewed by an early 17th-century English churchman, scholar, and writer. One of its chapters deals with the uses of music as a cure for depression, care, and sorrow. Five excerpts follow:

Musick is a tonick to the saddened soul, a Roaring Meg (Roaring Meg was a powerful cannon of the time) against Melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul, affecting not only the ears, but the very arteries, the vital and animal spirits; it erects the mind, and makes it nimble.
 
It will . . . in the most dull, severe, and sorrowful souls, expel grief with mirth, and if there be any clouds, dust, or dregs of care yet lurking in our thoughts, most powerfully it wipes them all away, and that which is more, it will perform all this in an instant: cheer up the countenance, expel austerity, bring in hilarity, inform our manners, mitigate anger.
 
It makes a child quiet, the nurse's song; and many times the sound of a trumpet on a sudden, bells ringing, a carman's whistle, a boy singing some Ballad tune early in the street, alters, revives, recreates, a restless patient that cannot sleep in the night.
 
Your Princes, Emperors, and persons of any quality maintain it in their Courts: no mirth without Musick.
 
Many men are melancholy by hearing Musick, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth.