Physicians believed that lovesickness was caused by the production of excess black bile in the body. Humoral medicine underpinned European medicine and thinking about the inner workings of the body until the eighteenth century.
The theory was that the four humours – the bodily fluids of blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm – determined a person’s temperament. An imbalance of those humours led to certain sicknesses, depending on which humours were out of balance, whether an excess or deficit.
Based on their symptoms, melancholy and lovesickness were closely related. Many old texts suggested that lovesickness is a form of melancholy induced by an imbalance in the same bodily humour – black bile.
Seventeenth-century painters often use Dürer’s personification of melancholy to reference lovesickness by including a cupid in their work.