Every entry in the journal tagged medieval medicine.
Robert Burton spent thirty years on a thousand pages about his own black bile, and wrote plainly that he wrote of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy. It is the largest book anyone produced inside the humoral system.
Vesalius could not find Galen's anatomy in a human body in 1543, and Harvey showed that blood circulates in 1628. Physicians went on bleeding patients for another two hundred years, and the reason why is the interesting part.
A teenage boy in Bukhara talks his way into a royal library, then grows up to write the medical book that Europe and the Islamic world studied for six hundred years.
A Greek physician was told to study a town's winds and water before he treated anyone in it. Airs, Waters, Places is the oldest surviving argument that place shapes character, and the source of two thousand years of prejudice about it.
Ficino sang to a lyre in Florence in the 1480s and called it treatment, not recreation. In humoral medicine music was a substance with a quality, like a herb, and the four names outlived the theory in Nielsen and Hindemith.
For centuries, medicine and astrology were a single craft. The zodiac man ruled the body from Aries at the head to Pisces at the feet, and the twelve signs fell into the same four elements as the temperaments.
For two thousand years, a body out of balance was something to bleed, purge, or carefully manage. Here is how it was actually done, and why medicine left it behind.
In the medieval pharmacy every plant was hot, cold, wet, or dry, and prescribed to push a body back toward balance. Here is how that worked, herbals and screaming mandrake and all.
For centuries, every apple, cut of meat, and cup of wine carried a hidden nature, and eating well meant eating to keep yourself in balance.
Colour, warmth, hair, flesh, the pulse, the look of the eye. A physician once read the mixture straight off the body, and the shortcut ran from Galen to della Porta's woodcuts to Lombroso's born criminal.
On the Tyrrhenian coast south of Naples, a town of doctors became the first medical school in western Europe, the place where Galen's humors came home to the Latin world.
One of the few women whose scientific voice survives from the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen wrote about the four humors and bound them to her own greening vision of body, soul, and world.
A medieval doctor held a glass of urine to the light, felt for the character of a pulse, and read your build and habits, all to guess the balance of humors within. Here is how that art worked, and how a modern quiz quietly inherits it.