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This thesis presents a conceptual-historical analysis of mānikhūliyā (melancholia) as articulated in the ninth-century treatise Maṣāliḥ al-abdān wa-l-anfus ("Sustenance of the Bodies and Souls") by Abū Zayd al-Balkhī (d. 934 CE). Moreover, this study avoids treating al-Balkhī’s treatise as an outlier anticipating modern psychology and attempts to situate it within its Abbasid context, tracing its intellectual genealogy from ancient Greek humoral theory and Aristotelian psychology to late antique consolatory ethics and the Graeco-Arabic translation movement. His work joins the multitude of manuscripts that comprise Abbasid-era discussions of melancholia, whose study remains peripheral in most modern histories of the disease.

Part I reviews the development of melancholia as a disease and a disposition from Hippocrates and Aristotle to Rufus of Ephesus and Galen. Part II explores the historical and intellectual milieu of the Abbasid era, highlighting al-Balkhī’s relationship with al-Kindī and the translation movement that transmitted Greek medical and philosophical texts into Arabic. Part II then delves into a contextualized reading and analysis of al-Balkhī’s treatise, Maṣāliḥ al-abdān wa-l-anfus, and his classification, etiology, and pathology of melancholia. Part III further discusses how al-Balkhī’s treatment of ḥuzn, jazaʿ, melancholia, and waswās reveals him to be a mediator of body and soul, of philosopher and physician, and of Hellenistic ideas and Islamic terminology.