[Suffering of the heart, song of the lips--some examples from the history of melancholia].

Melancholy--the word has many and varied significations. It has more or less disappeared from the medical vocabulary; in ICD-10 it is only used for depressions with somatic symptoms. However, the concept continues to live on in cultural contexts; in the newspaper as a classification of an artist or his work as a distinguished form of moody creativity, or in cultural theory as an existential or philosophical category. In this article, the historical basis for this remarkable variety of significations is traced. From its beginnings in antiquity with Hippocrates and the humoral theory, through the renaissance focus on the genius, to the separation of humanist and medical disciplines, the concept lives on and takes on new meanings on its way.