The Four
Humors
How people thought
bodily fluids affected
emotion
Quick History
Many ancient civilizations noted a
connection between bodily fluids
and illness. You probably have, too.
For example, if someone has snot
running from their nose, are they
sick or are they well? If someone has
a very red face because the blood
has rushed there, are they angry or
sad?
The Greeks
The first record of someone creating a comprehensive system of
bodily fluids was by a Greek physician by the name of
Hippocrates. You may have heard doctors refer to him in the
form of the Hippocratic Oath. Hippocrates was a contemporary
of Plato, and many of Plato's works reference Hippocrates' work.
Later on, a Roman named Galen would add to Hippocrates'
work. While Hippocrates focused on health and disease
connections to the humors, Galen would add to it by connecting
a person's temperament and personality to imbalances in their
humors. This will be explored in more detail when we look at the
individual humors.
Humorism
Broadly defined, humorism is the belief that the body is influenced by four fluids
produced by organs in the body. The four fluids are: Blood, Phlegm, Black Bile, and
Yellow Bile.
Each humor would increase and decrease depending on many factors, such as what
you eat, the time of year, the temperature, your gender, and the time of day. If a person
had an excess or an insufficient amount of a humor,
this would lead to an imbalance, and a there would
be a predictable change in the ill person. We will
break this up humor by humor.
Blood
Blood production was linked to spring and summer, where people were thought
to have an excess amount of blood because of their red complexions. But why
else would a body push all of the hot blood near the surface then start to sweat?
It may be that during the summer months before air conditioning was invented,
the body put the blood near the skin and then produced sweat to cool off. This
may be why the blood humor was linked to hot and moistness in ancient times.
According to Galen, if a person had excess blood, they would be described as
'sanguine,' which is derived from Latin and means to deal with blood. If you had
a sanguine personality, you would be sociable, charismatic, enthusiastic, and
active. This may be because people who have jovial tendencies can have a ruddy
or red complexion.
Excess blood was easy enough to treat. A physician would practice bloodletting,
or allowing a certain amount of blood to be released from the body. Modern
research into this technique has found no real benefits.
Phlegm
Phlegm, that nasty stuff you get in your throat after drinking something cold or when you are sick, was
another humor. Obviously the phlegm humor was associated with cold and dampness. The season
associated with phlegm is winter. When you put all of this together, it makes a certain level of sense that is, if you don't take modern biology into account. In the winter it is cold, so you may have some
phlegm in the morning. In the winter, while it is cold and damp, people get sick and have even more
phlegm. Obviously it must be the phlegm causing the illness!
Galen labeled people who had excess phlegm as phlegmatic.
A person who is phlegmatic is described as quiet, relaxed,
and sluggish. When you are sick you don't feel well, so you
lay in bed to get better. If you looked in through the
window and saw this person with excess phlegm lying in
bed, not talking much because he is sick, you may describe
him as…relaxed, lazy, sluggish, and quiet. Again, science
aside, this stuff makes a certain level of sense.
Black Bile
Black bile is a bit of a mystery as there is no black bile
found in the body. Descriptions of what it may have
been are fairly broad, with best modern guesses
believing it to have been clotted blood. As blood
oxidizes and ages, the red turns to brown, and the
brown then turns black. Black bile was associated with
the gall bladder as well as diseases of fear and
despondency. This led it to be known as melancholia,
literally meaning sad.
Excess of black bile was understood to cause
depression, and inversely a decline of feeling or
opinion that cause the liver to produce blood
contaminated with black bile.
Yellow Bile
The choleric (yellow bile) under the sun was proper to rulers
and self-willed women, and under Mars to soldiers,
roisterers, and drunkards. It was considered unlucky. Excess
of yellow bile was thought to produce aggression, and
reciprocally excess anger to cause liver derangement and
imbalances in the humors.
The Choleric humor is Hot and Dry. It is produced by the
liver and stored in the gallbladder. Bile has a hot, caustic
nature and a Digestive virtue, or force, which gives it a
strong affinity with the other digestive secretions of the
middle GI tract. Fire and bile digest and consume,
metabolize and transform.
Treatments
The treatments for disease within humoral theory
were concerned with restoring balance. These could
be relatively benign and focused on changes in dietary
habits, exercise and herbal medicines. But other
treatments could involve more aggressive attempts to
re-establish balance. As well as having the body
purged with laxatives and emetics, or the skin
blistered with hot iron, individuals already weakened
by disease might be subjected to bloodletting because
practitioners mistakenly believed that their bodies
contained an excess of blood.