nourishment of the body, i.e., of its tissues, which consequently owe their
existence to the humors. The [Aristotelian] elements of fire, earth, and
water do not exist as such in the body; they are represented by yellow bile,
black bile, and phlegm, respectively.”^9 Air, Aristotle’s fourth element, is
the pneuma of the Stoics (the vital spirit or creative force of a person), and
is the vehicle of vital and psychic functions.
To understand Hippocrates’s 4th-century B.C.E. mindset, remember that
English physician William Harvey’s breakthrough experimentation of
blood circulation was still almost two thousand years away. The ancients
had no concept of circular blood flow, which we trace starting at the heart,
coursing through the aorta and subsequent smaller vessels—all the way to
the narrowest blood vessels, the capillaries—with a gradual reversal to the
thin-walled, low-pressure veins that form tributaries, like ever-widening
rivers on their way to the ocean, to the massive vena cava that empties
back into the heart. If you are reading this book you probably understand
that blood does not simply “dump” into your muscles, like a container of
meat being splashed with blood. Instead, your muscles are thoroughly
perfused with tiny blood vessels, too small to see with the naked eye.
There is no reservoir in our body where all the juices (Hippocrates’s
simplified bile, blood, and phlegm) collect together. Why would he
conjecture this way?
It seems that Aristotle was the first to scientifically dissect an animal,
and perhaps it was his pupil, Diocles who was the first to dissect a
human.^10 In the ancient world, human dissection was permitted until being
outlawed by the Romans. The Hippocratic physicians would have been
allowed to dissect the dead, but this was before embalming and
refrigeration, and would have demanded fairly quick action before
putrefying flesh made investigation too repulsive. Presented with a
recently deceased person or animal, an ancient physician would have
likely made cuts into the abdomen, finding smelly bowels filled with half-
digested food and large blood vessels containing congealed blood, dark
purple in color. In the abdominal cavity, surrounding the bowels, there was
abdominal fluid, like warm apple juice. Handling the organs, the kidneys,
liver, and spleen would be crimson and full of gelatinous, molten blood.
The gallbladder, anchored below the liver, would have been large and
pear-shaped. Slicing into it, pea-sized gallstones would have tumbled out
with yellowish fluid oozing over the examiner’s hands. In the thoracic