"On the Nature of Man," from the Hippocratic Corpus

"On the Nature of Man," from the Hippocratic Corpus

Though not entirely political in nature, "On the Nature of Man" established a concept of medicine that remained in prominence for much of European history until the Scientific Revolution, humoralism (discussed week four of HIST 139). The text proposes the existence of four humors in the body that affect appearance, temperament, and health--black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Each was associated with one of Aristotle's elements (black bile with earth, yellow bile with fire, phlegm with water, and blood with air) and certain emotional characteristics (black bile to melancholic, yellow bile to choleric, phlegm to phlegmatic, and blood to sanguine). Whenever an issue with health occurred, the problem was identified as an imbalance of humors. As such, practices such as bloodletting enabled patients to "restore balance." Furthermore, environmental factors could affect humoral balances as well, promoting the excess or deficiency of a certain humor (black bile is dry and cold, yellow bile is hot and dry, phlegm is wet and cold, and blood is hot and wet).
In her book The Body of the Conquistador, Rebecca Earle illustrates the political significance of humoralism. Having expanded into the Americas, the Spanish were encountering disease they had not developed immunities to. To explain the Spaniards’ sudden deterioration of health, scholars diagnosed an imbalance of humors due to the temperature/humidity changes of the new environment. As such, the Spanish invested significant amounts of money attempting to solve said imbalance through the transportation of traditional Spanish foods across the ocean. The consumption of a regular Spanish diet was supposed to restore balance to the humors.
Additionally, the Spanish utilized humoralism to account for the phenotypic and behavioral differences between themselves and Native Americans. Observing the environments in which the Native Americans lived and the food they ate, the Spanish theorized that while they were once white (as the Bible proclaimed that humanity shared an origin), their conditions affected the balance of their humors, which in turn manifested in darker skin, less facial hair, and diminished appetites. Through this, the Spanish believed that they could “cure” the Native Americans if their lifestyles were changed to that of the Spanish. However, this also meant that the Spanish could gradually become more Native American if they followed the Native Americans’ lifestyles. In making the Native Americans more Spanish and “civilized,” the Spanish justified their colonialism as humanitarian (discussed week four of HIST 139) (Earle).

Hippocrates (or Polybus, his son)

Earle, Rebecca. The Body of the Conquistador. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Hippocrates. "On the Nature of Man." In Hippocrates, translated by W. Jones, 1-42. Vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. 2005. Accessed November 17, 2018. https://archive.org/stream/hippocrates04hippuoft#page/n9/mode/2up.
Table of Contents in a Fourteenth-century Hippocratic Corpus Manuscript. 1525. Online Vatican Exhibit, Vatican City. In Wikimedia. June 14, 2011. Accessed November 17, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vat-gr-277-10v-11r.jpg.

c. 400 BCE

Moses Jehng

Photo: Public Domain