This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at U Toronto chapter.

Humoral medicine is a theory of health and disease that retained authority and popularity from the time of Hippocrates in 400 BC to roughly 1800 AD. The humoral theory was alive and well for over two millennia. If we consider that our current accepted theories of medicine have only been around for roughly two to three centuries, I think you’ll agree that the humoral theory is worth learning.

This theory centers around the idea that disease is nothing but imbalance of the body’s internal fluids, of which there are – you guessed it, four.

The Aristotelian-Medieval scientists believed that the body was made up of blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. Blood is hot and wet, black bile is dry and cold, phlegm is wet and cold, and yellow bile is dry and hot. Does this sound familiar? This directly correlates to the properties of the four elements discussed in Aristotelian Physics, where each element had qualities such as weight, sense-abilities, and a season.

Not only do these elements make up the terrestrial world around us, they are literally within us – in our internal bodily fluids. The Ancient Greeks believed that every human was born with a particular combination of fluids, one person having more blood, while another had more phlegm. Disease would occur when an imbalance to our natural humors occurred, whether it was losing too much blood in battle, a surplus of phlegm in cold weather, or eating charred food and suffering an increase of black bile. The way to achieve health and maintain balance was to..

RESTORE BALANCE TO THE UNIVERSE.

Seriously, when my prof started going on about “restoring balance” the first thing that popped into my head was Aang from Avatar. I suppose in a way, physicians were almost like Avatars in the way that they had to see which humor was deficient in the patient and think up solutions on how to redress this deficiency or surplus.

For example, let’s say a patient is born with a higher percentage of blood than any other fluid. He is injured in battle and loses a lot of blood, thus disrupting his natural balance. After patching up the wound, the physician would recommend that the patient engage in light physical activity to stimulate his organs and produce more blood, while eating fruits and vegetables, which were also thought to increase blood production.

If the opposite were true and the physician discovered the culprit behind a high fever was a surplus of blood, he would engage in bloodletting: surgically puncturing a vein in order to remove quantities of blood until the physician deemed the body to be in balance once more.

Just smiling like there isn’t a stick in my arm. Coo coo.

Aristotelian Humoral medical practices – they aren’t for everybody.

How would the humoral physician be able to determine whether somebody naturally needed more blood, or more yellow bile? Here’s where it gets (even more) interesting. Not only did the four elements have physical properties, they had abstract properties such as emotions and feelings.

There were four different temperaments called sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. Somebody who is sanguine would be boisterous, happy, loud, and energetic. Sanguine personalities make friends easily as they are quite sociable, but can be flighty and fickle at the same time. They have a surplus of blood in their body, their season is spring and their element would be air.

A person who is melancholic would be sad and contemplative with a gloomy look on life, often preoccupied with the tragedy and cruelty in the world around them. Melancholic characters are not naturally sociable, and prefer to reflect on life alone. Their season is fall and their element would be earth.

If a person were choleric, they would be feisty and argumentative, quick to jump into an argument or into a new project. They are excitable, restless, and filled with aggressive energy. Choleric corresponds with the season of summer and the element fire.

Lastly, if you are phlegmatic you would be a real whiner – just think of phlegm itself. Just kidding! Phlegmatic people were thought to be deep thinkers and private introverts, highly consistent in their routines and actions, which make them good friends. Phlegmatic people are often patient and calm to correspond with the element of water, and the season of winter.

Galen – the doctor credited with temperamental additions to the humors – was the first physician to connect the health of the body to the health of the mind. A physician with steady patients would be able to evaluate his temperament through frequent observation, and if a sanguine patient (more blood) was all of a sudden sad and contemplative on the horrors of war or the tragedy of death, the physician would be able to assume that there is a surplus of black bile in his patient which was causing him to be melancholic.

How is somebody born with one of these dispositions, however? Is it luck of the draw? Is there a giant dartboard in the heavens with the four humors on the, and the divine creator simply throws a dart every time somebody is born? (I strongly believe this is how professors in the humanities mark our essays. But I digress.) No to all the above. In fact, we are swiftly getting to the topic of the article: astrology.

Lol I missed. 60, 60 for everybody!

Part 1: Aristotelian Physics

Part 3: Astrology

Photo Sources:

http://static.planetminecraft.com/files/resource_media/screenshot/1237/A…

http://phisick.com/core/wp-content/uploads/bloodletting.jpg

http://user-cdn.spring.me/photos/20121213/n50ca65012157d.jpg

http://s1.favim.com/orig/8/amanda-bynes-easy-a-emma-stone-girl-happy-Fav…

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/015/573/Bnhzak2CMAAmX8Z…

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yl8uqRkGDLA/UfreQzrfggI/AAAAAAAANLA/6pEWCuMi9U…

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/227/897/tumblr_lw3y7kSj…

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr02/2013/9/19/10/anigif_enh…