HISTORY 70F Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Dyscrasia, Sexual Intercourse, Humorism
Document Summary
Represents a turning point in the history of the western world -> source of illness is natural causes not supernatural forces. Ancient/classical greece (8th 4th c. bc: political organization, polis (city-state, autonomous, self-governing, decentralized, no central power dictating how the city-states should be run. Concerned with ideas of the immediate human world: rationality, skepticism encouraged to question things. Ancient greek medicine: pre-5th century bc literary records show us what medicine was like, homer, the iliad, drawn upon a combo of magical and naturalistic healing practices. Humoral theory: four humours, phlegm/mucous/ blood, yellow bile, black bile, excess of one of these fluids leads to a worse temperate, phlegmatic too much mucus, sanguine happy, optimistic, illness = humoral imbalance in the 4 humors. Concluding points: continued to use hippocratic methodologies until the 18th century, attributed illness to natural things, making the point that physical and empirical laws apply to our bodies.
