[lit-ideas] The Four Humours and English Literature
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 20:17:57 EST
Thanks to R. Paul for his comments.
>It was Galen (c. AD 129–c. 210),
>who postulated the four humors.
And thank you for the excerpt from the Oxford Dict. of Phil. (I never came
across that monster!, I hope it's nicely edited -- and contributions
individually acknowledged?)
I guess I was confused by the Loeb:
_http://www.hup.harvard.edu/loeb/author.html_
(http://www.hup.harvard.edu/loeb/author.html)
where you can see that one volume is about
_Humours_ (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/L150.html)
along with
Heracleitus: On the Universe
The 8th volume is on Haemorrhoids and Fistulas
So I suppose Galen at least got the _word_ "humour" from Hippocrates.
The Loeb has a one-volume edition of Galen, so I should check if the idea of
the four humours is excerpted there.
Cheers,
JL
----
Hippocrates lived much earlier: the 5th C BC. He was a contemporary of
Socrates'.
'Little is known of him except that he was short, travelled much, and
probably died at Larissa. The Corpus Hippocraticum or body of writing to which
his
name became attached in fact contains no part that can be reliably attributed
to him. His fame as the ideal doctor, and the first to treat the body as a
whole organism, rests on Plato (Phaedrus 270 a) and the subsequent escalating
attribution of medical wisdom to him. The Hippocratic oath enjoining doctors
to heal rather than to harm is possibly of Pythagorean origin.' [The Oxford
Dictionary of Philosophy]
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