Every entry in the journal tagged four humors.
In 1964 Hans Eysenck published a diagram with two axes and the four classical temperament names printed around the rim. It is the honest starting point for what survived the twentieth century and what did not.
Robert Burton spent thirty years on a thousand pages about his own black bile, and wrote plainly that he wrote of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy. It is the largest book anyone produced inside the humoral system.
Vesalius could not find Galen's anatomy in a human body in 1543, and Harvey showed that blood circulates in 1628. Physicians went on bleeding patients for another two hundred years, and the reason why is the interesting part.
On a Greek island around the fifth century BC, and in Rome six centuries later, two physicians who never met gave us the language of temperament we still use.
A teenage boy in Bukhara talks his way into a royal library, then grows up to write the medical book that Europe and the Islamic world studied for six hundred years.
In On Mixtures Galen laid out nine states of the body: one perfectly balanced centre and eight ways of leaning off it. The four temperaments everyone knows are only four of the eight, and the balanced ninth was the one he prized most.
Air, food, sleep, motion, evacuation, and the passions of the mind were the six things a physician told you to manage. They were the working core of humoral medicine, its everyday preventive plan.
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.
In 1527 Paracelsus reportedly burned Avicenna at Basel and lectured in German. He traded the four humors for salt, sulphur and mercury, and asked about cause rather than balance.
In 1598 Ben Jonson put a medical theory on stage. The four humours failed as science but survived as a language for character, from Shakespeare's melancholics to the way we still say someone is in a good humour.
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.
The same black bile that physicians bled out of patients was, for Ficino and Agrippa, the mark of depth and vision. This is the long idea that melancholy is the temperament of genius, traced from pseudo-Aristotle to Duerer's stalled angel.
For two thousand years, a body out of balance was something to bleed, purge, or carefully manage. Here is how it was actually done, and why medicine left it behind.
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.
In the medieval pharmacy every plant was hot, cold, wet, or dry, and prescribed to push a body back toward balance. Here is how that worked, herbals and screaming mandrake and all.
In 1798 Kant kept the four temperaments and threw out the fluids underneath them. Wundt and then Eysenck turned what he left behind into two crossed axes, which is how Galen's four names ended up on a modern personality diagram.
For centuries, every apple, cut of meat, and cup of wine carried a hidden nature, and eating well meant eating to keep yourself in balance.
Colour, warmth, hair, flesh, the pulse, the look of the eye. A physician once read the mixture straight off the body, and the shortcut ran from Galen to della Porta's woodcuts to Lombroso's born criminal.
From Hippocrates to Avicenna to the Renaissance: how a theory of bodily fluids became a lasting map of human character.