SADNESS IS A COMMON HUMAN MOOD; its causes can be many and varied. At face value, it is a normal emotional response to challenging life experiences, such as the death of a loved one or the end of a meaningful relationship. Sadness is often considered pathological, however, if it arises without a clear and identifiable cause and lingers indefinitely as a negative mood that colors the individual's perception and experience of the world. From antiquity to the late nineteenth century, the common term for this pathological version of sadness was “melancholy” or “melancholia” and it was typically described in medical and cultural discourses as sadness with insufficient or no apparent cause. Developments in psychiatry throughout the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the term “depression,” which replaced “melancholy” and “melancholia” in medical discussions. Today the latter two terms barely feature in the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV, 2000) of the American Psychiatric Association. No longer central to the field of medicine, “melancholy” now evokes, perhaps more one-sidedly than in earlier periods, a contemplative, even poetic mood of brooding introspection. However, this contemporary distinction between poetic and scientific versions of melancholy should not obscure the fact that, until nineteenth-century psychiatry turned from “melancholy” to the more specifically medical term “depression,” the man of letters viewed “melancholy” as both literary and medical.