CLST 205 Lecture : Ancient Humor Lecture One, Part 1-3.docx
11 Sep 2013
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When you behave in an automatic way without reference to the ever changing world around you, you will become a social nuisance. Humor: speech speaks, we stop thinking without linguistic constraints, english constrains us to say things that have already been said before, humor originally a medical term. Ancient medicine: no idea what the human body looked like on the inside. Ancient greeks and romans terrified of body mutilation after death: hence no human dissections. Worst curse to lay on any one was: go to the crows (greek, go to the cross (roman) Greeks and romans that any wounds inflicted on the dead after burial would be born in the shades of the underworld. Ancient doctors allowed to let imagination run wild: they thought that the human body was governed by four liquids or humors: Black bile - from gull bladder: the four humors had to be kept in temperate.
