... 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...

... and their effects. All this complicated even further the already intricate cause-and-effect reasoning of humoralist medicine. Other traces left by humoralism in the language used in the let- ters, however, are easier to detect. This is certainly the case for the repeated appearance of blood, phlegm...

... constitutions influenced the qualities of the mind as well as of the body: Galen, the noble physician, transferring the forces of our natural humors from the body to the mind, attributeth to the yellow color prudence, to the black constancy, to blood mirth, to phlegm courtesy...