... or imbalance of blood and phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. We have seen the diagrams showing each humor as a blend of heat or cold, wetness or dryness. We have learned the etymologies of words like sanguine and choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic, and been taught how laziness, and anger, and other...

... of the humors (especially phlegm and bile), their roots in fleshly decomposition, narratives of Western medicine have instead privi- leged a concept of health that results from a harmony, or balance, of essen- tially salutary humors: disease, defined “obliquely,” is, in effect, “a depar- ture from optimal...

... by learning that his mood comes from black bile. Because this doesn't permit a distancing. Black bile is melancholy. Now he just knows that he's in the grips of the real thing. 11 Premodern texts do not permit such distancing either, if only because an authorizing or buffering process has never...

... found in witch trials, including that of “diabolic melancholy”: black bile ruled the bodies of female and male witches, which caused diabolic melancholy. “Dark melancholy” was understood to close “the mouth with concealing silence, it caused hardness of the heart, as well as unrest and false tears...

... bladder and the biliary duct. The students could see with their own eyes how bile moved from the gall bladder to the intestines when it was squeezed — which Falloppia assumed would normally happen due to the liver pressing on it (GH 207v). Similarly, he demonstrated the function of the above...

... by the disease arising from black bile?”49 As I have shown elsewhere, the short answer to this question seems to be that melancholia produced a near madness — a divine frenzy that was the sign of inspiration — the kind of frenzy that Spenser’s poetic persona seems to have experienced when he had access...

... of ane fluke. – [The yawn of a gray mare, the cry of a goose, The penis of a drake, and the dive of a duck, The bile of a green dove, the leg of a louse, Five ounces of a flea’s wing, the fin of a flounder.] The mélange of nonsensical, medical, poetical, and obscene...

... obscure: “soto la sepultura voio sia scrito de letere grose legi- bile questi versi numero 4. Bartholomeus exam. Bragadeno sanguine cretus: / questo è primo / lo sichondo qui musas colui socratica[s?] que domum questo sie lo sichondo verso / lo terzo / patritios liqui heredes quos seva...

... by the figure of Elene, mother of an emperor and herself a saint. That nexus of political, saintly, and maternal power resonates with the conventional gen- dering of Rome as herself female, as in Horace’s lines about Roma as the “queen of cities”: “Romae principis urbium / dignatur suboles inter ama- biles...

..., melancholy, or bile as terms in the patients’ accounts.25 These substances are mentioned above all at two moments, first, when they attempt to describe their temperament or constitution, specifi- cally their humoral constitution. One clear example is that of the friar who starts his letter to Peralta...

... University Press ness caused by an accumulation of black bile that “overpowered” the suf- ferer with dark “moods or frenzies.” It was in this dissociative state that the novice mistress tried to take her own life. Like her contemporaries, Maria Celeste struggled to understand this condition in which...

... (or abscess) of the brain caused by a fever induced “by bile or by blood boiling in the heart” [de ague colre ou de sanc boyllant el quer] and that it affects memory, reason, and imagination depending on the part of the brain in which it occurs. How- ever, the Euperiston associates...