The broken heart in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain was no mere poetic image, with physicians recording cases where the heart literally ruptured following romantic rejection or the death of a loved one. This lecture will explore the embodied experience of loving and losing love, asking, what did it mean to die from a broken heart? The lecture's title derives from a letter sent from the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft to her faithless lover Gilbert Imlay in 1795, where she described how 'There are characters whose very energy preys upon them; and who, ever inclined to cherish by reflection some passion, cannot rest satisfied with the common comforts of life’. Others described symptoms including loss of appetite, drooping spirits, pining, distraction, and overpowering sorrow, culminating in the death or breaking of the heart. This lecture will use letters, case notes, medical notebooks, novels, paintings and prints to explore heartbreak as both a pathological condition and pervasive cultural phenomenon. Studying the causes, symptoms, and cultural constructions of heartbreak sheds light on gendered experiences of emotion, and the changing relationship between emotions and the body in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. It also reveals the nature of love as an intense but capricious passion with potentially deadly consequences.