humoraltheory-blog

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Welcome to my Tumblr Page on Humoral Theory!

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1. Dictionary.com Definition vs. Oxford English Dictionary Definition

Dictionary.com Definition:

"humor". Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 25 Feb. 2017. <Dictionary.com http://www.dictionary.com/browse/humor>.

(in medieval physiology) one of the four elemental fluids of the body, blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile, regarded as determining, by their relative proportions, a person's physical and mental constitution.

Oxford English Dictionary Definition: 

"humour | humor, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2016. Web. 25 February 2017.

I. Physical senses. 1.a. In ancient and medieval physiology and medicine: any of four fluids of the body (blood, phlegm, choler, and so-called melancholy or black bile) believed to determine, by their relative proportions and conditions, the state of health and the temperament of a person or animal. In early use also: †any of the four qualities (hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness) believed to be associated with these (obs.)

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2. Encyclopaedia Britannica Definition vs. Wikipedia Definition

Encyclopaedia Britannica Definition: 

"Humour." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 3 Feb. 2017. academic.eb.com.manowar.tamucc.edu/levels/collegiate/article/humour/41508. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.

Humour, also spelled Humor,  (from Latin “liquid,” or “fluid”), in early Western physiological theory, one of the four fluids of the body that were thought to determine a person’s temperament and features. In the ancient physiological theory still current in the European Middle Ages and later, the four cardinal humours were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile); the variant mixtures of these humours in different persons determined their “complexions,” or “temperaments,” their physical and mental qualities, and their dispositions. The ideal person had the ideally proportioned mixture of the four; a predominance of one produced a person who was sanguine (Latin sanguis, “blood”), phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic. Each complexion had specific characteristics, and the words carried much weight that they have since lost: e.g., the choleric man was not only quick to anger but also yellow-faced, lean, hairy, proud, ambitious, revengeful, and shrewd. By extension, “humour” in the 16th century came to denote an unbalanced mental condition, a mood or unreasonable caprice, or a fixed folly or vice.

Wikipedia Definition (Humorism): 

Wikipedia contributors. "Humorism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 22 Feb. 2017. Web. 25 Feb. 2017.

Humorism, or humoralism, was a system of medicine detailing the makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers, positing that an excess or deficiency of any of four distinct bodily fluids in a person—known as humors or humours—directly influences their temperament and health. It is also present in the Indian Ayurveda system of medicine. The humoralist system of medicine was highly individualistic, for each individual patient was said to have their own unique humoral composition.[1] Moreover, it resembled a holistic approach to medicine as the link between mental and physical processes were emphasized by this framework.[2] Ayurveda, which is known to have been practiced in the 6th century C.E, names three elemental substances, the doshas (called Vata, Pitta and Kapha). Ayurveda is still widely practiced in India. From Hippocrates onward, the humoral theory was adopted by Greek, Roman and Islamic physicians, and became the most commonly held view of the human body among European physicians until the advent of modern medical research in the nineteenth century. The concept has not been used in medicine since then.

Blood

The blood was believed to be produced exclusively by the liver. Yellow bile Excess of yellow bile was thought to produce aggression, and excess anger reciprocally gave rise to liver derangement and imbalances in the humors. Black bile The word "melancholy" derives from Greek μέλαινα χολή (melaina kholé) meaning 'black bile', from the belief that an excess of black bile caused depression. Phlegm Phlegm was thought to be associated with apathetic behavior, as preserved in the word "phlegmatic.” The phlegm of humorism is far from the same thing as phlegm as it is defined today. Nobel laureate Charles Richet MD, when describing humorism's "phlegm or pituitary secretion" in 1910 asked rhetorically "this strange liquid, which is the cause of tumours, of chlorosis, of rheumatism, and cacochymia - where is it? Who will ever see it? Who has ever seen it? What can we say of this fanciful classification of humours into four groups, of which two are absolutely imaginary?"

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3. Three Websites from Google Search on “Humorism”

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/techniques/humours

This website provides a brief description of what humorism is and explains that the theory of the four humours, “was a model for the workings of the human body. It was systemised in Ancient Greece, … It remained a major influence on medical practice and teaching until well into the 1800s.” This article also shows the association between the four humours and the four fundamental elements (air, water, earth, and fire). It was thought that good health was the result of all four humours being in perfect balance, and that treatments for disease were mostly concerned for restoring balance in humours that were off.

http://www.passionsandtempers.com/v1/page.php?l=en&p=humours

This article takes a rather literal view of humorism, arguing for its applicability and relevance. “Passions and Tempers aims to change the common view according to which our modernity - and especially our modern, mechanistic science - was born in opposition to everything that preceded it, pointing to the endurance of old ideas in contemporary culture.” This page also details characteristics and associations identified with persons having one humour as dominant to others. It also offers a humoral personality test for you to see which humour you are.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/shakespeare/fourhumors.html

This website explores the relationship between the humours and Shakespearian characters. It examines Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice. In the human body, the interaction of the four humors explained differences of age, gender, emotions, and disposition. The influence of the humors changed with the seasons and times of day and with the human life span. Heat stimulated action, cold depressed it. The young warrior’s choler gave him courage but phlegm produced cowards. Youth was hot and moist, age cold and dry. Men as a sex were hotter and drier than women.

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4. Google Scholar Sources

1. Melancholia and the Waning of the Humoral Theory Jackson, Stanley W. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences; Oxford33.3 (Jul 1, 1978): 367.

This article examines the relationship between Melancholia and mental disorders or depressive natures throughout history. “For Hippocrates, melancholia was associated with ‘aversion to food, despondency, sleeplessness, irritability, restlessness,’ and he stated that ‘fear or depression that is prolonged means melancholia.’”

2. Humoral Medicine in Guatemala and Peasant Acceptance of Modern MedicineMichael Logan (1973) Humoral Medicine in Guatemala and Peasant Acceptance of Modern Medicine. Human Organization: Winter 1973, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 385-396.

Peasants of highland Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America classify foods, medicinal plants, illnesses and modern medicines according to a conceptual scheme of opposition between the qualities of hot and cold. Although anthropologists have presented descriptions of humoral medicine as a folk-belief, rarely have they examined the direct implications of this concept for improving the medical treatment of patients who subscribe to it. Native adoption of the Hippocratic theory of disease originally introduced by the Spaniards has created a situation whereby peasants frequently reject prescribed treatment because of contradictions arising between modern and humoral philosophies of health. When physicians prescribe medicines or dietary regimens that conflict with a patient's belief in the humoral concept, the successful treatment of that patient can be adversely affected. From the patient's point of view, treatment can only be effective if the prescribed medicines or foods are of an opposite temperature quality of his disorder. By analyzing the cognitive system underlying humoral classifications and demonstrating how commitment to humoral medicine can impede effective patient care, suggestions for improving health programs in Latin America are presented for medical personnel, thus illustrating the applicability of anthropological research in the medical sciences.

3. FOSTER, G. M. (1988), the validating role of humoral theory in traditional Spanish-American therapeutics. American Ethnologist, 15: 120–135. doi:10.1525/ae.1988.15.1.02a00080

In conventional interpretations of humoral theory in Spanish-American popular medicine, the “principle of opposites” model (a Hot remedy for a cold illness, and vice versa) is viewed as prescriptive, that is, as a guide to therapy. Anomalous ethnomedical data from Tzintzuntzan, Mexico, suggest the opposite, that the role of theory is to validate empirical remedies administered with little or no thought given to theoretical dictates. It is further suggested that validation of prevailing curing practices is a special case of a broader principle, that the role of many cultural institutions is validation rather than prescription, as often described.

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5. Humoral Theory Meme

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6. Expanded List of Related Key Words:

[Humor]

Humour, Humoral, Humoral Theory, Humoralism, Humorism, Medieval Medicine, Ancient Greek Medicine, The Four Temperaments, Four Humors, Fluidism, Phlegm, Hippocratic Theory, Humoral Doctrine, Bile, Blood, Spleen, Medical Theory, Theoretical Medicine, Humoral Pathology, Four Fluids. 

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7. Articles Found on the Modern Language Associaton International Bibliography - Found using expanded Keyword search.

1. Foster, George M. "The Validating Role of Humoral Theory in Traditional Spanish-American Therapeutics." Amer. Ethnologist, vol. 15, no. 1, Feb. 1988, pp. 120-135. EBSCOhost, manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1988041551&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Abstract: In conventional interpretations of humoral theory in Spanish-American popular medicine, the “principle of opposites” model (a Hot remedy for a cold illness, and vice versa) is viewed as prescriptive, that is, as a guide to therapy. Anomalous ethnomedical data from Tzintzuntzan, Mexico, suggest the opposite, that the role of theory is to validate empirical remedies administered with little or no thought given to theoretical dictates. It is further suggested that validation of prevailing curing practices is a special case of a broader principle, that the role of many cultural institutions is validation rather than prescription, as often described.

2. Gidal, Eric. "Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French Enlightenment." Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2003, pp. 23-45. EBSCOhost, manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2003297374&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Abstract: This essay revisits the clichéd opposition of the splenetic English and the lighthearted French found in travel writing, novels, and political and cultural criticism throughout the eighteenth century. It observes how French writers from Voltaire and Prévost to Montesquieu, Grosley, and Madame de Staël transformed melancholy from a sign of humoral imbalance, intellectual genius, or religious vocation into both a symptom and cause of political freedom and national identity. These eighteenth-century thinkers offer a model of a peculiarly civic melancholy that stands as a link between earlier humoral theories of emotional dispositions and modern psychoanalytical accounts of national ideologies.

3. Marcheschi, Daniela. "'Humourism' in European Literature." Enthymema: Rivista Internazionale Di Critica, Teoria E Filosofia Della Letteratura/International Journal of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philosophy, vol. 2, 2010, pp. 81-91. EBSCOhost, manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2016310320&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Abstract:  What is Tradition? We usually (and wrongly) think it coincides with History. It would be better to think of Traditions, that is various experiences that co-exist in history and can be picked up to build on one’s system of values to be passed on to future generations. Our knowledge is actually based on traditions, and literature makes no exception. In this paper the author shows how one tradition, i.e. the comic-humoristic one, has marked European culture and literature. Its extraordinary genealogy has been written down by Gerard de Nerval: from Apuleius through Petronius, Swift, Diderot, Voltaire, up to Lawrence Sterne. Nevertheless, in the course of time, the comic-humoristic tradition has been able to attract many other novelists, poets and artists who have brilliantly enriched our cultural experience. It is possible to go back to the nineteenth century and track down many lines of the comic-humoristic tradition acting in European cultures, in order to show their dynamics, their interactions and their influence even at the outset of children’s literature.

4. Snider, Alvin. "Hard Frost, 1684." Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 8-32. EBSCOhost, manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2008582938&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Abstract: A series of severe winters in the seventeenth century moved observers to attend carefully to the weather and to attribute a powerful agency to the cold. Drawing on Hippocratic theories on how specific climatic conditions confer physical and intellectual advantages on the inhabitants of a region, they devised new techniques for reading the elements and new arguments for understanding the interrelatedness of the body and the world. In England, the winter of 1683-84 stood out in its harshness, and many observers recorded the effects of the cold. This essay takes up Royal Society reports, diaries, ballads, painting, sermons, and other documents to explore concerns that the temperate climate that supposedly made the English better suited for ascendancy than peoples in frigid or torrid zones could vanish into history. In these texts we see how English weather mediates between exterior and interior realms, and how English identities are constituted in the operations of climate.

5. Müller, Eugenia C. "'Scattered Genealogies': Melancholia and the Libro De Buen Amor." Bulletin of Spanish Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, vol. 89, no. 1, Jan. 2012, pp. 1-32. EBSCOhost, manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2013321003&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Abstract: As an emblematic text that brings into focus the losses inherent in human love, the Libro de buen amor is permeated by melancholy undertones. While the Libro's accounts of amorous distress have often been interpreted in the light of the protagonist's unscrupulous behaviour, their presence in the text in fact produces essential discoveries about the nexus of traditions coalescing around melancholia at the close of the Middle Ages. Weaving together insights from previous analyses, this study places the Libro within the broad history of melancholia by examining its treatment of melancholia, lovesickness, and acedia within the web of relationships emerging around the concepts of love and sexuality in the medical, religious as well as literary discourses. Arising in the wake of the troubadours' attempts to reevaluate the concept of love and contemporary with the secularization of acedia that brought the Patristic view of tristitia into popular discourse, the Libro's polymorphic representation of melancholia is filtered through the widely disseminated tradition of lovesickness and the humoral doctrine of temperaments. The poem thus synthesizes the intellectual shifts and new directions that, toward the end of the Middle Ages, prepared the terrain for a new understanding of human experience.

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8. Texts Analyzed in MLAIB Articles. - Could be used as additional research resources.

1. From “Hard Frost” Article: 

Clifton, Francis, trans. Hippocrates upon Air, Water, and Situation; Upon Epidemical Diseases; and Upon Prognosticks. London, 1734.

2. From “Civic Melancholy” Article: 

Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).

3. From “The Validating Role” Article: 

Mathews, Holly F. Context-Specific Variation in Humoral Classification. American Anthropologist 85: 826-847. 1983

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9. One Author from Analyzed Texts found in MLAIB Articles.

Jennifer Radden

"The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva." Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 77, no. 1, Winter2001, p. 13. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=4007221&site=lrc-live.

"Jennifer Radden." Baker & Taylor Author Biographies, 02 Jan. 2000, p. 1. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=49277005&site=lrc-live.

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10. Memes from MLAIB Articles.

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11. Articles from JSTOR - found using expanded keywords.

1. Foster, George M. “On the Origin of Humoral Medicine in Latin America.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4, 1987, pp. 355–393. New Series, www.jstor.org/stable/648542.

2. CHEVALIER, JACQUES M., and ANDRÉS SÁNCHEZ BAIN. “Humoralism.” The Hot and the Cold: Ills of Humans and Maize in Native Mexico, University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. 3–15, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/9781442681460.6.

3. Donald Bockler. “Let's Play Doctor: Medical Rounds in Ancient Greece.” The American Biology Teacher, vol. 60, no. 2, 1998, pp. 106–111., www.jstor.org/stable/4450428.

4. Balzer, W., and A. Eleftheriadis. “A Reconstruction of the Hippocratic Humoral Theory of Health.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift Für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, vol. 22, no. 2, 1991, pp. 207–227., www.jstor.org/stable/25156549.

5. JACKSON, STANLEY W. “Melancholia and the Waning of the Humoral Theory.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 33, no. 3, 1978, pp. 367–376., www.jstor.org/stable/24625539.

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12. Images of Texts referenced in previous JSTOR Articles - additional sources for possible research.

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13. Memes from JSTOR Articles

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14. My Day in the Stacks

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15. Book from Inter-Library Loan

“The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture” by Roxann Wheeler 

According to the introduction of this text, “when present-day North Americans and Britons think about race, we are likely to default automatically to skin color. Preconception about skin color and about other differences between what we now call races are so ingrained in our contemporary culture that many of us hardly think twice about the complexity of the terms black and white. This association between color and race first became commonplace during the eighteenth century and obtained particular currency in the new discipline of natural history” (p. 2) It explains the relationship between how color became the key defining term for race and other ways in which humans were described as different historically, from religious reasoning to commerce. The text also discusses humoral theory, “The ancient Greeks regarded complexion as a holistic concept. In encompassed people’s disposition and cast of mind, as well as their general health and skin color. Humor theory linked the environment to the mind and body in a symbolic relationship. Conventionally, each region of the earth produced nations with a particular cast of humors that dominated the behavior and appearance of the inhabitants” (p. 22).

Wheeler, R..The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 

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16. More Memes