The Tradition, From Hippocrates to Now
Twenty five centuries in one line: how the four temperaments were born, argued over, given up as medicine, and quietly kept as a way to read character.
-
5th century BC
The four humors are born
On the Greek island of Kos, the school of Hippocrates ties health to a balance of four fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.
Read more -
c. 400 BC
Climate shapes character
The Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places argues that the winds, water and seasons of a place mould the temperament of the people who live there.
Read more -
2nd century AD
Galen sets it in order
In Rome, Galen turns the humors into a scheme of nine mixtures around one balanced centre. The famous four are only its corners.
Read more -
1025
Avicenna's Canon
In Bukhara, Avicenna gathers the whole theory into the Canon of Medicine, the book Europe would study for six hundred years.
Read more -
11th century
The School of Salerno
On the Italian coast, the first great medical school of the Latin West brings the humoral tradition home and teaches it as a practical craft.
Read more -
12th century
Hildegard of Bingen
A German abbess writes her own account of the humors, folding body, soul and the green force of life into a single view of health.
Read more -
13th century
The rules of regimen
Physicians settle the six non-naturals, the everyday things you can control, from air and food to sleep and mood, that keep the humors in balance.
Read more -
1489
Melancholy and genius
In Florence, Marsilio Ficino ties black bile to Saturn and to genius, so the sick humor becomes also the mark of the deep and gifted mind.
Read more -
1527
Paracelsus revolts
At Basel, Paracelsus burns Galen in public and offers a chemical medicine in place of the humors. He loses, but the question outlives him.
Read more -
1543
The body is opened
Vesalius shows the anatomy does not match Galen, and Harvey later proves the blood circulates. The plumbing the theory needed is gone.
Read more -
1598
The comedy of humours
Ben Jonson builds a genre on the four types, and the word humour completes its move from a bodily fluid to a mood or a passing quirk.
Read more -
1621
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton spends a thousand pages on his own black bile, the largest book of the humoral world and, by accident, an early book on depression.
Read more -
1798
From fluids to mind
Kant keeps the four temperaments but cuts them loose from the blood, treating them as forms of feeling and activity. The shape survives; the fluids do not.
Read more -
1964
Two axes return
Hans Eysenck reaches two dimensions from questionnaire data and prints the four classical names around them. The old map returns from new arithmetic.
Read more -
today
What remains
The humors are gone as biology, but a two axis map of warmth and reactivity still describes people well. That is what the test measures now.
Read more