Leonhard Thurneysser (1531–1596), ‘The Four Humoral Temperaments’

Leonard Thurneysser zum Thurn (1531-c.1596) was a metallurgist, physician and alchemist. ¹ In his work Quinta Essentia (1574), he includes this illustration of the four humoral temperaments and the elements and zodiacal signs associated with them. The ancient medical authority Galen helped to define the four temperaments theory, suggesting that there existed four fundamental personality types: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. These personality types were associated with different human moods, emotional states, and behaviours that were supposedly caused by an excess build up, or alternatively a lack of, four body fluids (called ‘humours’): blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.