SC - four humours/food

[J C Ronsen]

At 10:58 PM 4/28/00 -0500, you wrote:

>Does anyone have information they would like to pass on as to how the
>four humours, Sanguine, Choler, Phlegm, and Melancholy related to food
>in the middle ages.
>
>  I'd like to know how different foods and various ways of preparing them
>may have led to a better balance in the four humours to a medieval
>person's mind.
>
>As many of you have pointed out, there are countless, varying opinions
>today as to how foods should be balanced in our daily diet.  (Someone
>mentioned the lovely snack promoted by Dr. Atkins of cheese wrapped in
>fried bacon.  Most of us would probably cringe at the thought of all
>that cholesterol and fat.)
>
>I'm sure opinions varied as much in medieval times.  But what was
>promoted by the different personalities of the time about this topic?



Actually, the four humors were: Blood, Phlegm, Yellow Bile and Black Bile. 
To quote James Burke from his fantastic book, "Connections:" "These four 
humors were associated with the material substances in the world around: 
blood was associated with heat, phlegm with cold, yellow bile with dry, and 
black bile with wet. Fire was hot, and so was summer. Water was cold, and 
so was winter. Air and spring were dry, earth and autumn were wet. The 
connection with astrology was close enough for much of the common-sense 
medical knowledge in the Rule to give way to the mumbo-jumbo of the Humoral 
Theory of treatment."

The Humoral theory gave advice such as "Dry, yellow bile makes a man 
choleric and would best be cured with cold brewet." (I think this is a 
fennel soup.) Conditions resulting from too little Black Bile can be cured 
or prevented by anything that is grown in the ground, problems with too 
much Blood can be fixed with fish (the cold of the fish canceled out the 
heat in the blood) etc etc. Unfortunately the Humoral Theory, like 
astrology, can be interpreted any way you wish.

The only source I have found that objectively talks about the Humoral 
Theory in depth has been "How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs" by D. L. 
O'leary. Everything else I've ran across have only devolted a brief space 
to describing the theory.







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mka: Caleb Ronsen
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