4 humors of hippocrates

What are the five types of temperament
Phlegmatic temperament
What were the 4 humors and what were they associated with

•

Browse History

In ancient times many physicians based their medical practices on their theory of bodily humors or fluids. In the classic form of the theory physicians regarded health as depending upon the balance of four humors in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile (choler) and black bile. Blood was the source of vitality, choler or yellow bile was the gastric juice crucial for digestion, phlegm was a lubricant and coolant, and black bile functioned to darken other fluids.

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.

Hippocrates’ humors also corresponded to personality

•

58 What Is Personality?

Personality

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Define personality
Describe early theories about personality development

Personality refers to the long-standing traits and patterns that propel individuals to consistently think, feel, and behave in specific ways. Our personality is what makes us unique individuals. Each person has an idiosyncratic pattern of enduring, long-term characteristics and a manner in which he or she interacts with other individuals and the world around them. Our personalities are thought to be long term, stable, and not easily changed. The word personality comes from the Latin word persona. In the ancient world, a persona was a mask worn by an actor. While we tend to think of a mask as being worn to conceal one’s identity, the theatrical mask was originally used to either represent or project a specific personality trait of a character.

The concept of personality has been studied for at least 2,000 years, beginning with Hippocrates in 370 BCE (Fazeli, 2012). Hippocrates theorized that personalit

•

Funny medicine: Hippocrates and the four humours

One autumn somewhere around the year 400 BCE, a man named Philiscus, from the island of Thasus, spiked a fever and went to bed, where he sweated through a comfortless night.

The next day, he was even sicker. On the morning of the third day, his fever seemed to relent, but by night it was back, and more intense than it had been. He was thirsty, delirious, cold with sweat, his tongue dry, his urine black. By day five, his nose bled slightly and his urine was a better colour, but contained floating blobs “resembling semen”. His limbs grew cold, his urine again black, he slept fitfully and little. He breathed like a person “recollecting himself”, at sluggish intervals. His spleen swelled like a tumour, and on the even days of his illness, he suffered fits. In the middle of the sixth day, he died.

Thousands of years post mortem, the scrupulous, clear-eyed observations of Philiscus’s physicians, recorded in an ancient Greek text called Epidemics 1, one of around 60 medical texts collectively known as the