Among early modern English prose writers, Robert Burton has an unparalleled interest in the nature of his readership, in how his text is and should be read, and in the multiple effects that the process of reading can produce. The very first sentence of ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ imagines readers who are ‘very inquisitive to know’ the identity of the author under the disguise of the pseudonym. Yet Burton is equally inquisitive about who his reader is, and this question is intimately tied up with other aspects of his writing. ‘Thou thy selfe art the subject of my Discourse’ (I, 1), he memorably declares. This chapter explores the implications of this statement, paying special attention to the Anatomy 's paratexts. It examines Burton's presentation of his book as being intended to have curative effects, and the traditions that inform this, and shows how ethical, religious and medical approaches to therapy are brought together in his conception of the work as a gilded pill which rectifies the mind. Burton creates a rhetorical construction of the reader as an unknowable and invisible figure, deliberately emphasising his or her distance from the author and treating this as a beneficial aspect of publication. While parts of the Anatomy are targeted at specific types of reader, Burton encourages readers to profit from the work as a whole rather than select only what is immediately relevant to them. The chapter concludes by considering the nature of readerly ‘experience’ in Burton, his imitator Edmund Gregory, Thomas Nashe and Michel de Montaigne.