Maud Newton

“Most ancient thinkers ascribed great influence to the stars. Many also emphasized climate, landscape, diet, and so forth. The Hippocratics taught that these factors affected the balance of four basic fluids, or humors, in the body and that the humors in turn determined the wellness - or sickness - of a person, as well as the kind of child they were likely to have. Hippocrates's son-in-law, Polybus, associates each humor with a season: blood with spring, yellow bile with summer, black bile with fall, and phlegm with winter. He characterizes health as a state in which these humors "are in the correct proportion to each other" and pain and disease as a result of an imbalance.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“For those of us who do feel driven to explore our ancestry, compiling a family tree is often about rediscovering something that's been lost. The tools for approaching ruptures in families are new, but the ruptures themselves are not. Ancient literature is filled with lost ancestors and wayward children, with shunnings and estrangement's and gerrymandered lineages.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Humans have always struggled with the idea that our ancestors might determine our destiny, that they could bless us by passing along longevity or sex appeal or doom us with dementia, baldness, or gout. Over the past century, we've often thought in terms of genes versus environment. We've sought to know what our parents transmit through the raw material that produces us and what comes from the way we're raised. The either-or view of nature and nurture may be giving way to a more nuanced view, in some ways an older view. The hope and anxiety are timeless.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Ideas about transmission of traits between the generations have shifted over the ages. Biological inheritance is a surprisingly recent concept. The word "gene" came into existence only in 1909. Until about two hundred years ago, Western thinking on the matter rested on ancient theories that are largely unknown to us. Those ideas are part of the bedrock of Western philosophy, intertwined with the development of science, inextricable from our history and in some ways from our thinking even now. Much of the source material has been lost. Authorship of what remains is frequently uncertain. Even contemporaneous secondhand accounts can be contradictory. And, of course, most of what humans have thought about reproduction in their time on the planet was never recorded.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation