ABSTRACT

The ‘Theory of Humours’ was of remarkable longevity. Its origins stretch back to the Hippocratics of the fifth century bc and perhaps earlier; certainly the language of ‘humours’ has a long pre-theoretical history. The theory was codified into the canonical four (blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile) largely as the result of the enormous influence of Galen. The humours found their way into Arabic medicine in what we think of as the Dark Ages, and then back into mediaeval and Renaissance Europe. Although not unchallenged by further developments from the seventeenth century onwards, nonetheless vestiges of the theory as a medico-physiological doctrine survived at least into the nineteenth century in Western medicine and arguably beyond. There are still Galenic physicians in Delhi who deploy its categories and its influence is detectable in ayurvedic medicine generally.1 And it lives on, albeit with a slightly archaic patina, in the characterization of character types: sanguine, phlegmatic, bilious, melancholic. This chapter concentrates on the early history of the ideas as they developed in Classical Greece and eventually triumphed in the Galenic synthesis of the second century ad.