What did people do to balance the 4 humours?
What did people do to balance the 4 humours?
Classical medicine was all about balancing these humors by changing diet, lifestyle, occupation, climate, or by administering medicine. A cold and wet cucumber might help to redress the balance in a feverish individual, as might bloodletting. This was as true for mental illness as it was for somatic diseases.
What treatments did Galen use?
Galen usually treated his leisured, urban patients in their houses. He might visit them several times a day, tracking the course of their paroxysms. His therapeutic methods brought him into intimate contact with his patients: he bathed them, massaged them, cooked for them, and fed them.
How was black bile treated?
Treatments in antiquity for such an ailment were predominated by bloodletting, purging, and exercise. Moving into the Medieval Period, humoral etiologies for melancholia spread throughout the ancient world.
What are the four humours in medicine?
Courtesy National Library of Medicine Greek physician Hippocrates (ca. 460 BCE–370 BCE) is often credited with developing the theory of the four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—and their influence on the body and its emotions.
What method of treatment did doctors use to remove the humors they believed caused the plague in their patients?
These were controlled by the four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. An imbalance of humors caused disease and the body could be purged of excess by bleeding, cupping, and leeching – medical practices that continued through the Middle Ages.
How did doctors restore the balance of the humors?
Cupping, bleeding and purging were common methods used to restore the balance between the humours. In the early modern era, illnesses were thought to be caused by disturbances of the body, which, when perfectly healthy, was held to be in an inner state of harmonious balance, like the world or the cosmos.
How did Hippocrates treat his patients?
According to Hippocrates, the physician had to examine a patient, observe symptoms carefully, make a diagnosis and then treat the patient (1, 2, 5, 6, 12).
What is humoral therapy?
Humorism, the humoral theory, or humoralism, was a system of medicine detailing a supposed makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers.
Are the four humors still used today?
Imbalances between these humours were thought to be responsible for different moods and character traits – sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic are all terms still in use today. Good health was felt to reflect a state in which the four humours were in balance; diseases arose when they were not.