[Sca-cooks] Humoral origins (was: Anything going on?)

[Galefridus Peregrinus]

JIMCHEVAL at aol.com said:



In the West, I think that's easy: Anthimus (who includes actual recipes 
in


what is essentially a dietetic work). Cato doesn't touch on the idea in 
his


  collection of recipes and Galen's passing instructions on preparing 
food


are too  cursory to be recipes. (Pseudo-) Apicius doesn't touch on the 
idea


at all.





I'd surprised if you get any further back than works attributed to


Hippocrates for the general theory, though I believe he's thought to 
have had


older models. Going forward, Aldebrandino and Arnaldus may have been the 
first


to provide some detailed instructions for making food as part of 
dietetic


works.  It's more implied than specific in the first cookbooks, though 
Scully


does a  good job of teasing out the humoral underpinnings of the 
original


Viandier (as  opposed to the highly corrupt first published version).


To which I replied:


Yeah, I'm pretty certain that there's nothing prior to Hippocrates, and 
I had already figured out what you say in your first paragraph. In the 
East, Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq (10th century) appears to be the earliest 
extant source to integrate humoral practice into a cookbook. But I note 
that Hippocrates' Regimen is very detailed, and I want to do an item by 
item comparison with the Taqwim al-Sihha (11th century) to see whether 
Ibn Butlan used Hippocrates as his primary source.


As it turns out, the situation is more complex that I thought. WHS 
Jones' General Introduction in the Loeb Classical Library Hippocrates I 
volume is loaded with information on this matter. "The Doctrine of 
Humours" section (§ 8, pp xlvi-li) discusses the origins of humoral 
theory at length, citing a number of Greek physicians and natural 
philosophers (Empedocles, Philistion, Anaximander, Alcmaeon, and 
others) who put forth some form of the theory, all of whom lived 50-200 
years before Hippocrates. Regrettably, we have very little of the 
original writings of these individuals -- almost all we know of them is 
through the writings of other classical Greek physicians and 
philosophers. But it's pretty clear that some form of humoral theory 
existed well before it was articulated in detail in the Hippocratic 
corpus.


-- Galefridus