Lecture 6: The Alexandrian Exchange and the Four Humors
dietary regimens begins with the Hippocratic writers in the 4th and
5 th centuries B.C., which is classical Greece. There was a historical
fi gure named Hippocrates, but there was also a slew of other
authors—often referred to as Hippocratic authors—before and after
him whose writings were later ascribed to him. The Hippocratic authors who lived in Hellenistic times were often
physicians working for kings as patrons. None of these authors were
as important as Galen of Pergamum, who was a Greek physician
who went to work for the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and his
successors. Galen wrote more than any of his predecessors; in fact,
there are more surviving works by Galen and more pages written by
him than any other writer of classical antiquity. Galen’s importance is also that the theories he came up with
were adopted by many later civilizations: Byzantine, Islamic,
and European cultures into the 18th century. He was the medical
authority for almost 2,000 years. Elaborating on Hippocrates, Galen pretty much invented the
theoretical system known as humoral physiology. This entire system
is based on the already widespread idea that the whole universe is
made up of four basic building blocks, or elements: fi re, water, air,
and earth. Each of these can be described with qualitative terms like
hot and dry (fi re), cold and moist (water), hot and moist (air), and
cold and dry (earth). The actual fi re, water, air, and earth that we see are actually made
up of several elements; they’re not the pure element or essence.
Just as the universe is made up of elements, so are our bodies. The
human body is also regulated by four basic fl uids, or humors, that
correspond to the elements: blood, phlegm, yellow bile (or choler),
and black bile (or melancholy). Health was defi ned as the proportional balance of these four
fl uids, though all humans are born with a predominance of one
particular humor—or at least a tendency for that humor to be