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Humorism, the humoral theory, or humoralism, was a system of medicine detailing a supposed makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers.
Humoral theory was one of the central principles in Western medicine from antiquity through the 19th century. “Humoral” derives from the word “humor,” which, in this context, means “fluid.” The human body was thought to contain a mix of the four humors: black bile (also known as melancholy), yellow or red bile, blood, and phlegm.
Dec 16, 2020 · Coherent, elegant and (mostly) wrong-headed, humoural theory — which held sway in Europe until the Renaissance, and key ideas of which persisted for centuries afterward — is, more than anything, a cautionary tale about the human tendency toward systematic thinking.
Nov 28, 2018 · The theory that ascribes personality characteristics to the effects of bodily fluids, or “humors.”The humoral theory is the oldest known typology, or descriptive system, used for classifying all individuals into a limited number of categories.
- What’s Your Humor?
- Opposites Attract
- Bon Appétit!
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 diff...
According to humoral theory, each fluid possesses an elemental quality that reflects some combination of heat, moisture, coldness, or dryness. Foods also possess these qualities in varying degrees, which can be tempered by cooking methods. The way foods are categorized depends not so much on their perceived properties as on how they affect the body...
With the advent of the scientific revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, the humoral diet began to lose favor in Europe. The scientists and dietary writers who had once instructed people in balancing their humors now began to look more empirically at the basis for their advice. While their experiments and studies did not produce any compelling ...
May 3, 2022 · The theory of humorism and the four humors dominated medical thought from around 500 BC until the 1800s. Humorism was based on the idea that four essential fluids (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) in the body controlled a person’s health and personality.
Did Shakespeare believe in the four humours? And did he write ‘humours comedy’? To address these questions, this chapter suggests that humoral theory is intimately bound up with early modern ideas of selfhood, not merely as a metaphor, but as a literal understanding of the processes at work in cognition, emotion, and selfhood.
