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The Four Humours: Understandings of the Body in Medieval Medicine

With today’s medical knowledge, aided by technological innovations and remarkable discoveries, it can be easy to trivialise the theory of the four humours, to render it a foolish mistake made by the intellectually inferior people of the past. However, it is important to stress how, while the theory may not have proven to be medically sound, it was incredibly logical. This may sound strange, but the theory of the four humours, when contextualised within the dense and complex framework of belief systems and scientific capabilities of antiquity, makes an awful lot of sense. The concept of disease resulting from imbalance within the body is a seductive one. And to ancients who did not have the knowledge…

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 A Delicate Balance: Understanding the Four Humors

The four humors were a means of analyzing a person’s disposition as well as her physical, mental, and emotional health. Within this belief system, every person had a unique humoral composition that shaped her behavior, appearance, and interactions with the broader world. Visualized as bodily fluids whose levels were constantly in flux, Hippocrates named the four humors black bile, phlegm, yellow bile, and blood. Each humor was paired with one of the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air and was assigned qualities of cold, moist, dry, and hot. Their influence on the body changed with external factors like the time of day, the season of the year, and the age of a person.

 How Coffee, Chocolate and Tea Overturned a 1,500-Year-Old Medical Mindset

The humoral system dominated medicine since the Ancient Greeks—but it was no match for these New World beverages

 The four 'humours': Our 2,500-year-old mania for personality types

First suggested in ancient Greece, the four 'humours' personality types have shaped how we view ourselves for thousands of years – and still look oddly familiar today. If you've ever watched or read Shakespeare's late 16th-Century play The Taming of the Shrew, you'll be familiar with the antiquated gender tropes at play. The famous story centres on protagonist Petruchio, who exacts various punishments on his headstrong wife Katherine to transform her into an "ideal" pliant and submissive woman.

 The Legacy of Humoral Medicine

To students and beneficiaries of western biomedicine, the greatest contribution of the ages-old humoral model might seem to be the expressions it provides for describing someone's disposition: he is in good (or bad) humor; or we might even say, "he is phlegmatic." But the humoral theory left more than a linguistic legacy. The group of fourth- and third-century BC physicians known as the Hippocratics who formulated (and more importantly wrote about) their theories, were the first organized group to consider that illness had natural—not supernatural—causes.

 “And there's the humor of it” Shakespeare and The Four Humors

William Shakespeare created characters that are among the richest and most humanly recognizable in all of literature. Yet Shakespeare understood human personality in the terms available to his age—that of the now—discarded theory of the four bodily humors—blood, bile, melancholy, and phlegm. These four humors were understood to define peoples’ physical and mental health, and determined their personality, as well.

Articles of Interest

Shakespeare and the four humours

Blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile: the body’s four humours were believed to control your personality in Shakespeare’s day and influenced the way the Bard created some of his most famous characters.

The Four Humors

The four humors that pump through my body determine my character, temperament, mood. Blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler. The excess or lack of these bodily fluids designates how a person should be. I don’t know what choler means, and when I google it, the internet leads me to a link asking whether choler is a Scrabble word.

The Four Temperaments

Around 500 years before the birth of our Savior, the spirit of science began to be applied to the practice of medicine. Where before the ancients looked to "the gods" to explain the workings of the natural world, Hippocrates (b. ca. 460 B.C.) urged that sine qua non of science: observation. In the course of the studies that merited his becoming known as "the Father of Medicine," he noticed that blood removed from the body separates into four parts: the clear red, a yellowish liquid that rises to the top, the dark liquid that settles to the bottom, and whitish fluid. He and his students, especially his son-in-law, Polybus, took these observations and developed a theory of medicine that was to hold sway in the West and in the Islamic world for thousands of years -- a theory further expounded upon by Galen: that physical and mental health are a matter of a good balance of four liquids ("humors"), all believed to be produced in the liver, but which are found in the veins and are associated with various organs of the body.

Ancient Theory of Elements and Humors

Hippocrates (460-377) who was one of the originators of the theory of humors, made analogies between these humors and the four elements of external nature. The theory of elements he drew from began with Empedocles (490-430). Empedocles theorized that everything in the world is made up of four basic elements: fire, air, water, earth. He called these four elements "roots", and associated each with Greek gods Zeus, Hera, Nestis, and Aidoneus. This theory of the four elements became a standard cosmology for the next two thousand years.

Balancing Your Humors

The four humors—black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm—represented different qualities: while black bile was cold and dry and yellow bile was hot and dry, blood was hot and wet and phlegm was cold and wet. Given these combinations, the humors could be matched onto the four seasons, the four elements, and—here's the mental health bit—four different emotional characteristics.

Being lovesick was a real disease in the Middle Ages

Medical ideas in the Middle Ages were based on the doctrine of the four bodily humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. In a perfectly healthy person, all four were thought to be perfectly balanced, so illness was believed to be caused by disturbances to this balance.

Bloodletting Is Still Happening, Despite Centuries of Harm

The appeal seems to be in its simple logic. Muhammad Gayas runs his bloodletting business in the garden of the Jama Masjid mosque in Old Delhi. He says pain and illness happen “when the blood goes bad,” which is pretty much the same basic premise that bloodletters have sold the public since Hippocrates advocated balancing the four humors—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—more than 2,000 years ago.

Funny medicine: Hippocrates and the four humours

In Ancient Greece, the physician Hippocrates and his disciples explained the healthy body as composed of four balanced ‘humours’. Their theory of medicine endured for millennia before it was eclipsed – but their teachings still have valuable lessons today.

Lessons From the Dictionary: The Many Moods of ‘Humor’

The root of the word humor is the Latin umor, meaning “fluid.” From there, it became the linchpin of the prevailing theory of human health and medicine in the classical (Greek and Roman) world, spreading to early Europe and the Islamic East. The Greek physicians Galen and Paracelsus were fundamental to establishing the “four humors” theory, which said that the body had four essential fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These needed to be in balance for a person to enjoy good health. Given pre-modern medicine’s tendency to try to connect everything under one umbrella (which lives on today in the form of alternative medicine), the four humors theory was soon linked to the four elements of earth, water, fire and air, and from there believed to be…

The Four Humors – What is Your Ancient Personality Type?

Known, in our present day, as The Four Humors, or Four Temperaments, this psychological theory influenced everything from the creation of the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator test, to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter popularly used today.

The Four Humors: Eating in the Renaissance

Humoral theory, based on the work of the ancient Greek physician Galen, holds that good health relies on a balance of four fundamental fluids: blood, choler (yellow bile), phlegm, and black bile. An ideal proportion (one quarter as much phlegm as blood, one sixteenth as much choler as blood, and one sixty-fourth as much melancholy as blood) is difficult to sustain since humors are continually influenced by what people eat and drink. So one humor will generally predominate and characterize an individual’s overall temperament or “complexion.” Too much blood, for example, results in a sanguine personality, and an overabundance of black bile makes one melancholy.

The History of the Four Personalities

The four personality types exemplified by the four colors have existed for centuries. Before they were called Fiery Red, Earth Green, Cool Blue, and Sunshine Yellow they were known as humors. The four humors dictated the four most common temperaments that people displayed. Hippocrates was the first to inspire the idea of humors, which were called sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. Carl Jung used the idea of the four humors to influence his discoveries about the intricacies of human behavior.