ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly locates Galen’s humoral teaching in his special reading of the Hippocratic On the Nature of Man and subsequent thought. It addresses Galen’s approach to these vital bodily fluids from the particular aspect of sensation/perception and does not revisit the complexity of humoral discussion in general. Galen’s humours were generated from food digested by the body’s heat, ideally into blood, which embraced the four necessary humours. Less than ideal heat or less than ideal food might generate too much blood, phlegm, or yellow or black bile and deposit it in an inappropriate part of the body, thereby generating potential imbalance leading to disease, if the body could not expel the residue. In Galenic thought, the humours lie behind other aspects of physiological activity, in particular mixtures. Galen often speaks of mixtures rather than humours as agents of change, in On Mixtures, for example. It is not always clear whether a chumos is a ‘humour’ or a ‘juice’, but the transfer of plant and animal chumoi (preferably cooked or processed) into the body through digestive processing (a second ‘cooking’) can be comprehended by perceiving the properties of the food before eating. More than digestion is at stake. Galen’s diagnosis and therapy depends on isolating causes of imbalance, to be achieved by testing the inputs into the body, the state of the body, and the characteristics of the waste products, identified by the senses. What is the taste and smell of the sweat, urine, and faeces, their texture, and visual appearance? Taste, smell, texture, and vision are more than vehicles of pleasure. They bring understanding and access to physiological well-being. They bring to each individual balancing of the vital fluids—the humours—and a good mixture.
