 The affective aspects of mental disorders are matters of particular interest. Some of that interest may have been personal, since ‘melancholy’ was widely taken to be a special affliction of the learned, a point that puts some of Hume’s discussion of the emotional effects of skepticism in context. ‘Enthusiasm,’ particularly religious enthusiasm, also garnered a great deal of attention, considered as a matter of excessive and contagious emotion that could be based in bodily disorders. But since many philosophers of the eighteenth century followed Shaftesbury in refusing to consider the physiology of the emotions, they relegated the bodily causes, components and effects to the attention of ‘anatomists,’ rather than of philosophers. More generally, the sort of humour-driven approach to medicine and pathology that informed many seventeenth-century accounts of the emotions declined among eighteenth century philosophers.