Every entry in the journal tagged four elements.
A Greek physician was told to study a town's winds and water before he treated anyone in it. Airs, Waters, Places is the oldest surviving argument that place shapes character, and the source of two thousand years of prejudice about it.
Four elements, four qualities, four humors, and four temperaments, all lined up so the body echoed the cosmos. The old and rather lovely idea of the person as a small world.
Ficino sang to a lyre in Florence in the 1480s and called it treatment, not recreation. In humoral medicine music was a substance with a quality, like a herb, and the four names outlived the theory in Nielsen and Hindemith.
Many cultures explained temperament through elemental qualities, but Ayurveda's three doshas, Unani mizaj, and Chinese medicine's five phases are genuinely different systems, not translations of the Greek four humors.
A plain guide to sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic: where the idea comes from, what each type is like, and why most of us are a blend.
The old tradition read a whole life the way it read a year. Sanguine spring, choleric summer, melancholic autumn, phlegmatic winter, each humor taking its turn.