We emitted tears, blood, mucus, saliva, sweat, urine, sperm or milk, but those were not humours per se. Geographically and chronologically extended, the long lineage of humoural knowledge guaranteed its authority: humours were imagined entities that were general enough to explain everything about the interlocked body and psyche, but too general to correspond to any real bodily substances. Many others participated in enriching this tradition that Burton so ravenously plundered. Melancholy brought forth a plethora of words in the Anatomy just as it had triggered authors before him to try and account for this powerful state - from the “pseudo-Aristotle” who first honoured its particular, potentially noble nature in the so-called “Problem XXX”, to Rufus of Ephesus and the 11th-century Constantinus Africanus, who translated at the Montecassino monastery near Naples the text, itself a translation of Rufus, written at the Tunisia court by the 9th-century Jewish Baghdadi physician, scholar and translator Ishâq ibn ‘Imran. As he put it, “he tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms” (I-3 1-II). In itself, black bile did not warrant any more attention than the other humours.īut its excess bred the states catalogued in Burton’s book. One was born with all the humours in a certain proportion, whose constancy guaranteed psychical and physical health any change in that proportion could signify the fall into a state of holistically conceived ill-health. And how we lived, what we ate, how much we drank, moved, studied, slept, loved where we lived, in hot or cold or dry or humid climates what gender one was, what age – all this influenced the humoural balance. In turn, these were in correspondence with the stars – one could be born under a constellation that conditioned one’s bodily constitution, astral and terrestrial bodies in close, one-way causal correspondence. To each of these humours was associated a corresponding element, along with its qualities: earth, cold and dry fire, hot and dry water, cold and humid blood, warm and humid. ![]() The melancholic would have a preponderance of black bile, the choleric, of yellow bile, the phlegmatic, of phlegm, the sanguine, of blood. Burton explained: “The gall, placed in the concave of the liver, extracts choler to it: the spleen, melancholy which is situate on the left side, over against the liver, a spongy matter, that draws this black choler to it by a secret virtue, and feeds upon it, conveying the rest to the bottom of the stomach, to stir up appetite, or else to the guts as excrement.” (I, 12,4)Īll humours arose in the liver out of the stomach-based concoction of so-called chyle from food, before being further refined with their spirits in the heart, then the brain. But it was at first a crass outcome of digestive processes. Black bile might be noble, in some of its manifestations. ![]() Mooted by the Hippocratics in 5th-century BC Greece on the basis of the view of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles that all matter was composed of the four elements, the humoural system that developed in the West (China and India each have their own humoural systems as well) had been systematized in the 2nd century by the Roman physician Galen, who associated humours with temperaments. The other two humours were phlegm, and blood. In its terms, black bile was a “cooked” version of yellow bile, or choler. To talk about melancholy was to engage in and endorse humoural theory. ![]() For black bile was a medical concept, one of the four bodily humours or fluids that coursed through the organism and determined its constitution, and along with it, our appearance and character, our strengths and weaknesses, our tastes, propensities and illnesses. The book is a catalogue of passions as well as a compendium of quotes and stories – not so much a medical treatise, even though there are, and must be pages on anatomy and physiology.
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