cavity, home to the lungs and heart, pulmonic fluid would be discovered
surrounding the lungs and filling the lobes with frothy liquid, like watery
tea in a sea sponge. The trachea and bronchial airways would almost
certainly have had a mucous residue so common in a dying man. In
conclusion, we have the four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and
phlegm. Without understanding organ function, the early anatomist would
deliberate over these fluids, seeking a unifying “theory of everything” to
explain the workings of the most interesting system in the universe. There
must have been a singular moment (upon a particular corpse), when
Hippocrates formulated and simplified his four humors theory; would
there ever be a philosophical offering more contemplated and recited than
this?
The individual humors, when dominant in a human being, contributed
to the personality and behavior. Each one of the four personality types,
based upon one of the humors, is familiar to our ears. In Greek, black bile
is melancholia, upon which our word for a depressed, “melancholic”
person is based. A calm, “cool-headed” person had an overabundance of
phlegm, and was therefore “phlegmatic.” An irritable, crotchety, or
“bilious” person has too much yellow bile and is “choleric.” If a patient
had a predominance of blood, and was spirited or intemperate, he would
have been called “sanguine,” from the Latin word for “blood.”
And here is the very important observation about the dominance of
Hippocratic theory all the way to the Scientific Revolution. Even the
savants of the Renaissance, who were forced to contemplate the function
of the body in a world without science, were powerless to resist the allure
of Hippocratic musings. Because the philosophical foundation was a fraud,
medicine was ineffectual, even lethal. The Hippocratics provided much
explanation for why the therapies worked: it never occurred to them they
did not.^11 If Hippocrates is the Father of Medicine, it is a dubious
paternity; we can’t identify any success associated with his (or his
followers’) theories.
The most logical intervention for a sanguine person would have been to
decrease the volume of blood. If the patient was “hot-headed,” or if a
disease was causing redness and heat (we would describe them as having a
“fever”), the Hippocratic physician would bleed the patient. This was
classically performed by cutting a vein (venesection), but later by cupping
(suctioning the skin with a cup) or applying leeches. “Bloodletting” was