Theory of the Four Humours

11 Key excerpts on "Theory of the Four Humours"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England

  Bodies, Plagues and Politics

  • M. Healy(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  10 The Theory of the Four Humours was further developed by Galen (AD 129–c. 200/210) and then by the Arabs, particularly Avicenna in the early eleventh century, and by the Salerno school of physicians throughout the Middle Ages. 11 The theory was very logical and seemed to account ad- equately for observed effects. Each humour was related to an element: blood, from the heart, was hot and moist like air; phlegm, from the brain, was cold and moist like water; yellow bile, from the liver, was hot and dry like fire; black bile, from the spleen, was cold and dry like earth. Within the individual body one humour was felt to dominate slightly, giving rise to recognizable ‘complexions’: both personality and external appearance were related to humoral type. A predominance of yellow bile thus gave rise to the choleric temperament; of black bile, to the melan- cholic; of blood to the sanguine; and of phlegm, to the phlegmatic complexion. When the humours were balanced in quantity and quality the condition of ‘eukrasia’ prevailed and man was healthy; if, however, one humour had come to dominate in an abnormal way, the mixture was bad, a ‘dyskrasia’ prevailed, and the individual was sick. Eventually the humours would ripen, forming a ‘coction’, and when they had matured, the polluting matter, the ‘materia peccans’, was expelled in the stools, urine, sputum or as pus. The physician’s role was to aid this natural pro- cess of purging and rebalancing by prescribing the patient emetics, enemas, and bleeding him. His treatment would be specific to the patient’s symp- toms, complexion and age and would take into account the workings and state of external nature. Bleeding, for example, was more appropriate in some months than others and for particular complexions. Similarly, astro- logical movements might be observed.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World

  • John R. Taylor, Robert E. MacLaury, John R. Taylor, Robert E. MacLaury(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In this sense, the humoral theory is a medical doctrine: it identifies diseases and their symptoms, and defines a therapy. Obviously, the basic therapeutic rule will be to restore the balance of the humors, given that a disturbance of their well-balanced proportion is the basic cause of the pathological situation. The long-lasting popularity of bloodletting, for instance (a standard medical practice that continued well into the nineteenth cen-tury) has its historical origins in the theory of humors. The connection between yellow bile and fire that was mentioned a moment ago is not accidental. It is part of a systematic correlation be-tween the human, anatomical microcosm and the macrocosm, thought to be built up from four basic elements. Thus, yellow bile, black bile, Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns 157 phlegm, and blood corresponded with fire, earth, water, and air respec-tively. In the Aristotelian elaboration of the Hippocratic doctrine, a componential analysis' was added to these correlating sets of microcos-mical and macrocosmical basic elements. They were defined, in fact, as combinations of four basic features: cold, warm, wet, and dry. (Needless to say, these four features are themselves related along two dimensions.) Blood was thought to be warm and wet, phlegm cold and wet, yellow bile warm and dry, and black bile cold and dry. The classical humoral doctrine received the form in which it was to dominate the Middle Ages in the work of Galen (129-199 A.D.). His incorporation of the humoral approach into an encompassing theory of the human digestive system is of particular interest. Galen distinguishes between three successive digestions. In the first digestive process, food is transformed into chyle in the stomach; the residue of this first digestion is feces. In the second step, the humoral fluids enter the picture.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Greek Medicine From Hippocrates to Galen : Selected Papers

  • Jacques Jouanna(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Brill

    (Publisher)

  These four humours exist from the formation of the foetus, in the semen and the maternal blood. Ch. 13 (ibid. 726,2–6;727,10–14;730,17–731,1K.): the four humours are mixed with each other and spread throughout the body. Each humour has its place: blood in the heart; phlegm in the head; yellow bile in the liver and black bile in the spleen. Good health comes from the equilibrium of the primary and secondary elements. Acute diseases all come from the blood and yellow bile; chronic diseases come from phlegm and black bile. However, there is no theory of the four temperaments. five.LTfour.LT There are substantial doubts amongst scholars on the date of the emergence of this theory. Schöner, Viererschema , is fuzzy. He speaks of the pseudo-Galenic treatises ( On the Humours ), p. 94f., but says nothing of their date. In another brief chapter entitled ‘VII. Ausgehendes Altertum’ (pp. 96–98),he mentions other texts related to the treatise Of the Constitution of the Universe and of Man , and then lists a series of pseudo-letters: in Greek, the Letter of Hippocrates to Ptolemy; in Latin, several others (Vindician’s Letter), as well as Pseudo-Soranus, adding to this group the Sapientia artis medicinae (“wahrscheinlich aus dem 6. Jahrhundert”). This is the only clear indication of the date of the quoted texts, but no arguments are provided. Schöner takes the position of the text’s editor, M. Wlaschky, ‘Sapientia artis medicinae. Ein frühmittelalterliches Kompendium der Medizin’, Kyklos 1, 1928, p. 113: “Zeitlich möchte ich den Text etwa in das 6. Jahrhundert verlegen.” By contrast, Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl (n. 10), p. 58, give a peremptory statement on the date: during the second or later in the third century a.smcpd.smcp , we observe the emergence of a complete schema of the four temperaments as types of physical and moral constitution.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Casanova's Guide to Medicine

  18th Century Medical Practice

  • Lisetta Lovett(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword History

    (Publisher)

  3 The thinking behind the properties of the humours was that man and therefore his bodily fluids, like any other object in sub-lunary space, must be made up of the four basic elements. Just as the elements were each characterized by two qualities, so were the humours. For example, blood was hot and wet whereas black bile was cold and dry. About 500 years later, this account of health and illness was endorsed and much elaborated upon by Galen of Pergamon, an imperial doctor, prolific writer, philosopher and brilliant self-publicist whose influence was to extend well into the late Renaissance.

  Humoral theory still had some adherents in the nineteenth century, despite the development of new medical paradigms and advances in anatomical understanding and medical instruments like the microscope. Why, we may ask, did it have this enduring popularity? First, the flexibility of the system gave physicians room for a variety of interpretations. Given that each humour had two elemental qualities, this allowed for several permutations per humour. For example, black bile might be judged as too dry or too wet but correctly cold, or too cold or too warm but correctly dry. This in turn gave physicians some latitude to argue a plausible explanation and treatment strategy for any illness. It is easy to envisage how differences in opinion on the precise nature of the imbalance could lead to plenty of professional disputes. Secondly, the ability of the average person to make a subjective assessment of their health using this system is likely to explain its popularity with the lay public. People could see with their own eyes their body fluids such as urine, catarrh or sputum, and knew that changes occurred in constitution, amount or smell when they were ill. Finally, the notion of health equating to equilibrium also seemed plausible, given that most people knew this from their own experience, a simple example being that if they drank too much their urine output increased. In general, it was not difficult for ordinary people to grasp the basic concepts of humoral theory and understand their personal role, indeed responsibility, in maintaining health through attention to their lifestyle.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Eating Right in the Renaissance

  • Ken Albala(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter 2 The Human Body Humors, Digestion, and the Physiology of Nutrition This chapter is a guide to the basic theory that underlies all Renaissance discussions of food and nutrition. Human physiology, digestion, and es-pecially the four humors are central to the entire topic and inform all specific food recommendations. These ideas are usually, but not always, set in the context of the broader topic of “hygiene” or rules for main-taining health by means of diet, exercise, and regulation of all external factors that affect the individual. The theories originate in the Hippo-cratic corpus and the writings of Galen and can be thought of as the sub-structure that links all dietaries in the Western tradition from ancient times to the early modern period. How Renaissance physicians evalu-ated food products is also firmly rooted in their understanding of hu-moral physiology. HUMORS The four humors are essential fluids manufactured in the body that regulate physiological functions. Although a complete theory of humors was not formulated at the time of the Hippocratic writers, they often re-ferred to health as a balance of hot or cold and moist or dry properties, and some authors referred to specific humors. The systematic descrip-tion of four distinct fluids was first proposed by Galen, who described the humors in terms of elemental properties. Blood was described as a 48 The Human Body 49 1. Cardano describes a symmetry of elements in “number, magnitude, and figure.” Girolamo Cardano, Opera Omnia, vol. 7, De usu ciborum (Lyon: Huguetan et Ravaud, 1663). The terms “quantity, concentration, and quality” are perhaps clearer. hot and moist humor, phlegm as cold and moist, choler (yellow bile) as hot and dry, and melancholy (black bile) as cold and dry. These four hu-mors determined a person’s physical constitution or “complexion,” which was the tendency of each individual from birth to be inclined to-ward an excess of one particular humor.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Food in Medieval Times

  • Melitta Weiss Adamson(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  added to the four qualities of Zeno the four bodily fluids blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile, and formu- lated a prototype of what came to be known as “humoral theory.” Blood was aligned with the basic qualities hot and wet, and the season spring; yellow bile with hot and dry, and summer; black bile with cold and dry, and fall; and phlegm with cold and wet, and winter. In time the four organs, heart, liver, spleen, and brain, and the four stages of life, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, were added to the system, and fire came to be associated with the quality hot, water with wet, air with cold, and earth with dry. Aristotle, who claimed that of the basic qualities only the four combinations hot and dry, hot and wet, cold and dry, and cold and wet were possible, was the first to speak of the four temperaments, one of the few remnants of humoral theory that has survived into the twenty-first century. When we de- scribe a person’s temperament today as sanguine, choleric, melan- cholic, or phlegmatic, we are, in effect, referring to their dominant bodily fluid or humor: blood (sanguis), yellow bile (cholé), black bile (melaina cholé), and phlegm. The Greek physician who was the most prolific medical writer and who influenced medieval medicine more than any other was Galen of Pergamon of the second century A.D. In selecting and harmonizing el- ements of the humoral theory he found in Plato, Aristotle, Hip- pocrates, and others, he created a system that was capable of describing the world as a whole, and all inanimate and animate objects in it. Galen added to the system the four qualities of taste (sweet, bitter, sour/spicy, and salty) that he aligned with the fluids blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, respectively. When it comes to temperaments, Galen lists a total of nine, four with one prevailing quality, four in which two qualities are balanced, and the perfect state in which all qualities are balanced.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Elsevier's Dictionary of Psychological Theories

  • J.E. Roeckelein(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  235 G GAEA/GAIA HYPOTHESIS. See LIFE, THEORIES OF. GAIN-LOSS THEORY. See EXCHANGE/ SOCIAL EXCHANGE THEORY; INTER- PERSONAL ATTRACTION THEORIES. GALEN’S DOCTRINE OF THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS. The ancient Greek phy-sician/philosopher Claudius Galen (c. 130-200) formulated the doctrine of the four tem-peraments of personality based on the earlier doctrine of bodily humors as outlined by the Greek philosopher Empedocles (c. 495-435 B.C.) and the Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460-377 B.C.). Empedocles posited that the universe is made up of the four basic elements of: earth , fire , air , and water , where combina-tions of these four elements, in one way or another, can explain all know substances. Each of the four elements has corresponding “qualities”: earth - cold and dry; fire - warm and dry; air - warm and moist; and water - cold and moist. When the qualities are taken with respect to the human body, they assume the form of four substances or humors : blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Hippo-crates considered these humors to be the basic constituents of the body where - depending on their deficiency, excess, or balance - they could cause both disease and health. In this sense, Hippocrates’ naturalistic approach and explanations of cause-effect relationships anticipated modern medicine and psychology, rather than appealing to the presence of “evil spirits” as the cause of diseases. Later, Galen systematized the relationship of the Empedo-clean/ Hippocratic notions of elements/humors into a general personality theory of tempera-ments where an excess of blood characterized the sanguine (warmhearted, cheerful) person, a preponderance of black bile related to the melancholic (sad, fearful) personality, an ex-cess of yellow bile led to the choleric (fiery, highly reactive) person, and an excess of phlegm typified the phlegmatic (slow, slug-gish) individual. Galen’s doctrine of the four humors and their corresponding temperaments was viable until about A.D.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Nutrition and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle and Aristotelianism

  • Romualdo Salcedo, Giouli Korobili, Roberto Lo Presti, Giouli Korobili, Roberto Lo Presti(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Sciendo

    (Publisher)

  This means that the proportion of qualities for each humor is variable and depends on the individual constitution. As a result, it can bring about a healthy ( “ natural ” ) or morbid ( “ preternatural ” ) variation of the humor. Fernel adds that the humors are in a pure state only in their dedicated organ: phlegm in the brain, yellow bile in the gallbladder, and black bile or “ melancho-lia ” in the spleen. Consequently, they are not pure in the blood mass, otherwise the body would not be healthy.¹ ⁸ For instance, the presence of pure yellow bile within blood is symptomatic of jaundice. Fernel anchors this reasoning in the Hippocratic treatise De nat. hom. , which states that the four humors are mingled within the blood, and that purgative drugs should be used when a humor is in excess (Hp. De nat. hom. 6, L. VI,44 – 46). Like many Renaissance physicians, Fernel describes the process of digestion along the lines of Aristotle ’ s Meteorologica. In this treatise, the notion of concoc-tion ( π έ ψις ) is considered as a broad category which designates either ripening in the same way as fruits, boiling like the digestion of milk and food, or roasting (Arist. Mete. IV,3, 380a11 – 381b22). These models of cooking were used in a med-ical context to describe physiological processes such as the formation of blood and the seed (Martin 2002 and 2008). Following this framework, Fernel defines the gastric concoction as the boiling ( ἕ ψησις or elixatio ) of the moisture of ingest-ed food by the innate heat (Fernel, Physiologia , p. 406 – 407). Concerning the di-gestion of chyle into the four humors, he refers to the Aristotelian definition of concoction as ripening and roasting. However, he extends it to an analogy with wine fermentation: We see that the innate heat of fresh must, collected into vats, makes it effervesce, be changed, and be digested.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Food, Feasting and Table Manners in the Late Middle Ages

  Volume I: The Iberian Peninsula in the European Context

  • Guillermo Alvar Nuño(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 The theory of humours applied to food in the Middle Ages From the Graeco-Roman tradition to mediaeval Latin Europe María Teresa Santamaría Hernández

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003318286-4

  Introduction

  Throughout the mediaeval period, the notion that food had therapeutic properties was ubiquitous in practical and theoretical medical treatises alike, albeit the latter were more typical of the Late Middle Ages. Moreover, all mediaeval dietary recommendations, including those regarding foodstuffs and nutrition, remained closely anchored to the classical Hippocratic- Galenic concept of health and disease, whereby ailments were interpreted as being the result of a humoural imbalance. Consequently, therapeutic procedures were aimed at regaining balance in order to restore health. It should be noted that the ancient concept of dietetics was not only concerned with food but also encompassed everything related to exercise, age, sex, sleep and wakefulness, as well as the influence of the seasons and the environment on human health. From this perspective, then, it is understandable that besides medicinal substances and products, foods were also thought to possess some of the four elementary qualities of the humours, often combined in pairs. Thus, just like medicines and other therapeutic resources, their consumption could counteract an excess or deficit of the humours, either attenuating or increasing them.

  It was within this conceptual framework that treatises drawing on the Graeco-Roman concept of a therapeutic diet appeared, some devoted exclusively to this notion and others including it in the context of related issues, usually the treatment of various diseases.1 Such treatises thus contained what we could call a humoural vision of foodstuffs, including an analysis and exposition of their nature and composition in terms of the four humours and of their capacity to stimulate or inhibit specific humours and to increase or attenuate their qualities when these affected the body. Besides their therapeutic use to alleviate the effects of specific illnesses or to cure them entirely, foodstuffs were often recommended in the treatises for preventive purposes, in order to avoid the onset of illness as far as possible.2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Psychology Of Character

  With a Survey of Personality in General

  • A.A. Roback(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Cynthia’s Revels as “ neither too fantastically melancholy, too slowly phlegmatic, too lightly sanguine, nor too rashly choleric ; but in all so composed and ordered, as it is clear nature went about some full work ”. Ben Jonson expresses himself with greater scientific pretensions, if not precision, in his play, “ Every Man Out of his Humor,” where he writes :—

  Why humour, as it is ‘ ens ’, we thus define it, To be a quality of air or water ; And in itself holds these two properties Moisture and fluxure : as, for demonstration Pour water on this floor. Twill wet and run. Likewise the air forced through a horn or trumpet Flows instantly away, and leaves behind A kind of dew ; and hence we do conclude That whatsoe’er hath fluxure and humidity As wanting power to contain itself Is humour. So in every human body The choler, melancholy, phlegm and blood By reason that they flow continually In some one part and are not continent Receive the name of humours. Now thus far It may, by metaphor, apply itself Unto the general disposition ; As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man that it doth draw All his effects, his spirits and his powers, In their confluxion all to run one way,— This may be truly said to be a humour.

  Burton on the Humors . It is, however, in Burton’s famed Anatomy of Melancholy that we find a detailed and quaint, not to say fantastic, description of the humoral doctrine :—

  A humour is a liquid or fluent part of the body comprehended in it, and is either born with us, or is adventitious and acquisite. The first four primary humours are—Blood, a hot, sweet, temperate, red humour, prepared in the meseraic veins, and made of the most temperate parts of the chylus (chyle) in the liver, whose office it is to nourish the whole body, to give it strength and colour, being dispersed through every part of it. And from it spirits are first begotten in the heart, which afterwards in the arteries are communicated to the other parts. Pituita or phlegm is a cold and moist humour, begotten of the colder parts of the chylus (or white juice coming out of the meat digested in the stomach) in the liver. His office is to nourish and moisten the members of the body. Choler is hot and dry, begotten of the hotter parts of the chylus, and gathered to the gall. It helps the natural heat and senses. Melancholy, cold and dry, thick, black and sour, begotten of the more feculent part of nourishment, and purged from the spleen, is a bridle to the other two hot humours, blood and choler, preserving them in the blood, and nourishing the bones. Mention must also be made of serum, and of ‘ those excrementitious humours of the third concoction, sweat and tears ’. An exact balance of the four primary humours makes the justly constituted man, and allows for the undisturbed production of the. ‘ concoctions ’—or processes of digestion and assimilation.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa

  Medical Encounters, 1500–1850

  • Kalle Kananoja(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  45 The century and a half separating these two doctors demonstrates that the major influence of humoural theory was therapeutic. Bloodletting was widely administered to European patients in Central Africa. In Portugal, as elsewhere in early modern Europe, phlebotomy was the primary therapy, and it was administered by barbers on doctors’ orders. 46 In humoural medicine, the body was envisaged as supporting a number of containers that, in sickness, were pervaded by unhealthy fluids, or humours. Excess fluids could be eliminated from the body by inducing vomiting (using emetics), by inducing diarrhoea (using purgatives and enemas) or by bloodletting. However, bloodletting came to be regarded as the sovereign remedy because it was believed that all four humours were to be found, in varying proportions, in the blood. David Wootton has strongly argued that Hippocratic medicine was bad medicine – it killed when it claimed to cure. 47 Phlebotomy was practised on European ships traversing the Atlantic and Indian oceans. A Portuguese captain bound for India wrote in the mid-seventeenth century about how, after his ship had got stuck in the calms of Guiné, he was bled ten times. After a two-month illness, he was 42 Cadornega, História geral, III: 318. 43 Mendes, ‘Caderno que trata das ervas’, 45, 303. 44 This is evident, for example, in his detailed observations on bloodletting. Aleixo de Abreu, Tratado de las siete enfermedades (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1623), 86–102. 45 Cosme, ‘Tractado das queixas endemicas’, passim. 46 Santos, ‘A Arte de Sangrar’, 44–47. 47 In other words, ‘Hippocratic medicine was not a science, but a fantasy of science.’ David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11. 168 Treating Their Symptoms: Limits of Humoural Medicine barely hanging on to his life, while fifty-three people on board the ship had died.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book