Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours

by Noga Arikha

“Passions and Tempers may excite passions and tempers in some of its readers, as a good work of intellectual history should. You will learn a lot from its pages.” —Washington Post The humours—blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler—were substances thought to circulate within the body and determine a person’s health, mood, and character. The theory of humours remained an inexact but powerful tool for centuries, surviving scientific changes and offering clarity to physicians. This one-of-a-kind book follows the fate of these variable and invisible fluids from their Western origin in ancient Greece to their present-day versions. It traces their persistence from medical guidebooks of the past to current health fads, from the testimonies of medical doctors to the theories of scientists, physicians, and philosophers. By intertwining the histories of medicine, science, psychology, and philosophy, Noga Arikha revisits and revises how we think about all aspects of our physical, mental, and emotional selves.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medicine, Science, Medical, Philosophy, Biology

400 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

Noga Arikha grew up in Paris and studied in London. She received a doctorate in history at London's Warburg Institute, was a Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, and has taught at Bard College and at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. She lives in New York and London.

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was loaned this book by a fellow researcher into matters of creativity, and the book is a fascinating and interesting one that discusses the way that humours were ancient and remain with us today as a way of explaining the health of the body and mind in a holistic fashion.  This book is like an hors d'oeuvre to a multi-course feast that one would want to read at considerably more length.  The author admits that there is a whole lot more material, including the shared Eastern commitment to a humoural theory that mirrors in many ways that of the Western tradition barely discussed here, that could have been written that wasn't.  And, like many books, the author writes about Galen's thoughts concerning creativity and its relationship to personality, but the primary sources are hard to track down here for mere mortals like this reader.  At any rate, given the influence of the theory of humours in contemporary personality theory and even in the way we still engage in psychological practice, this book touches on some important matters that the reader would do well to take seriously concerning the way in which we still see the human body and psyche in terms that relate to a theory that has been more or less subrosa for centuries now.

This book is about 300 pages long and is divided into seven chapters, each of which has quite a few subsections.  The book begins with acknowledgments, a list of illustrations, a prologue, and a note on terminology.  After that the author discusses the ancient insights regarding humours from the sixth century BC to the second century AD and showed that things were pretty nuanced early on (1).  After that there is a discussion of the classical trail of essences in Western philosophy and Medicine through the middle ages in Byzantium and the Arab world (2) and then the influence of miracles and scholasticism on Western Europe during that same time period (3).  The author discusses melancholy and the importance of the Renaissance (4) before turning to discuss the nature of blood and airs during the not particularly scientific scientific revolution that took place in the seventeenth century and opened the way to unproductive dualism (5).  After that the author discusses passions and the nerves in the brain looking at the birth of modernity and the creation of psychiatry up to the nineteenth century (6) before ending with a discussion of contemporary humors as the neurological and pharmacological self (7) in the present age, after which the book ends with endnotes, references, picture credits, and an index.

This book is interesting for a variety of reasons.  For one, it is the sort of book that encourages the reader to look up other sources about humoral theory as well as to consider the broader circumstances of health as it has existed throughout history.  The author makes it pretty clear that medical professionals throughout the history of the West have frequently been a coin-flip level of skill at most and sometimes actively harmful in most cases.  Sadly, that remains true at present as well.  The way that the book weaves together so many of the different implications of medical theory and the way that things can become embedded within language because they have been used for so long is quite fascinating as well.  One would wish that this book was not only one volume but a long series of volumes, but that might be a bit of overkill for some people when it comes to reading about this subject material.  That was not the case for me though because this book clearly left me wanting a lot more.

[Bruce Lerro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have people always believed they had personalities? If we define personality was what makes a person unique as a result of biological hardwiring plus socialization the answer is a resounding “No”. For most of history and across cultures people believed that their nature was determined by some combination of astrological influence and the proportion of liquids in the body. The latter was called temperament.

Noga Artkha takes up this fascinating topic in her book Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours. Arkha takes us all the way back to the Greeks and Romans and then slowly builds through the Middle Ages. The plot thickens and theories of temperament are challenged with the emergence Descartes dualistic ideas about the mind and the body and Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. When Locke argued that socialization and parenting plays a key part in individual identity, temperament theory is marginalized and personality theory becomes the leading explanation of individual psychology. I found this book mildly annoying because it got too much into the lives of individuals. It skids across the surface of history and does not include the impact of technology, economics and individualism on the change from temperament to personality. I would have appreciated more of a connection with psychological disorders. Nonetheless. a study of history of temperament is long overdue. And I was happy to stick with this book. It helped me very much on my research for a chapter in my book on the history of individualism in the west.

[Mary Overton]

A history of Western thought seen through the lens of medical theory and practice. What is health? What causes illness? How can illness be cured? Can illness be cured forever - conquering mortality? In order to consider these questions, thinkers imagined and invented concepts of the soul, the mind, and the fluids that sustained them. As Arikha makes connections betwixt and between science, religion, and philosophy, she has much to say about the human tendency toward patternicity, about the gaps between empirical, pragmatic healing and scholastic beliefs, about alchemy, psychology, and magical thinking.
"A humour is literally a fluid -- humon in Greek, (h)umor in Latin -- and bodily humours are fluids within a living organism. In the West, the theory developed that the human body was constituted of four of these humours, all central to its functioning. Phlegm was one of them; the three others were yellow bile, black bile, and blood." (xviii)
"Humours now remain familiar mostly metaphorically.... But humours do not survive just as linguistic habits: this book argues that their explanatory power has actually never gone away. It tells how and why this is, bringing them back to light, delving beneath the names we give to states of mind, to illnesses, and to the invisible world beneath our skin. It shows how humours have been recycled, continually reappearing in new guises, ever-present within evolving scientific systems and medical cultures." (xix)

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

As some have said, Ms. Arikha missed an opportunity. Though her history and her writing was competent, she did not engage the reader, which would have been a fairly simple task given her narrow audience. All that she needed to do was give us more about the humours themselves: what a superfluity of choler was supposed to do, what a dearth of phlegm did other than cause a head cold, etc. She went into great detail about old, sometimes ancient medical records, but never gave a likely or possible explanation of the diseases, which would have been fun and challenging for the readers--like a medical mystery. I wanted her to not just give me a history of humoural physicians, but of the humours themselves, by telling us more about the 'science' of it all.
That said, I did enjoy the outline of medicine over the ages and was fascinated by how much the humours remain in medicine even today.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

As vast in scope as it is rich in history. This was a truly remarkable book. It covered many aspects of forgotten medical history and wove an intricate tapestry with the use of the bodily humors, as imagined by ancient physicians, at the core. Going back to Ancient Greece and winding across continents and spanning centuries, this wonderful story shows that even though medical science evolved, the old ways are still always lurking behind the scenes. Wonderfully researched and vividly told, albeit sometimes a bit heavy and pedantic, this was a delight. Highly recommended to anyone interested in medical history, cultural anthropology, and students of the human condition. 8/10 only because I felt the language was unnecessarily verbose.

[Micki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have the soft-cover version. The book drags in the first parts, and only really gets interesting in the last few chapters, as Arikha discusses how the passions and tempers still influence medicine today.

I was trying to find more information about how the ancients thought about the humoural theory, and how they thought it actually worked. All the book really told me is that, yes, the ancients had a theory or two, and it was slowly replaced by different theories. Depression (melancholy) gets slightly more treatment in this book than the other humors, but still not nearly enough, IMO.

[Rebes · Rating 1 out of 5]

"It's not you, it's me. I didn't realize you'd be so philosophical. I'm more of an applied than theoretical gal".

I just couldn't get into this one. I skipped to the botanicals section, thinking "Here we go" and instead was gripped by the same malaise.

[Asa Hershoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The text contains some solid and historical research and fascinating facts regarding the history of the Humors, mainly in the Middle Ages. However, a cultural bias is strongly present. Ironically, the the superstitious and absurd beliefs that arose around the five elements that are ridiculed here are echoed by the author's own fixed and culturally-biased mindset. The elements and humors are just an irrational belief of those foolish people who apparently lived on this planet before the scientific era, when we suddenly became smart. The great thinkers and meditators of the past were morons. Also there is absolutely no reference to the predecessors to the Greco-European tradition of the elements, particularly as it pertains to India. And the myths and blatantly false notions about the early Greek origins of the elements by Empodecles are repeated without enquiry. There is no attempt to dig deeper into the rich matrix of elemental information from Pythagoras onwards. In brief, an intellectually shallow scholarly work with no real spirit of enquiry into the meanings or understanding of living traditions of the Elements.

[Satadru Sengupta · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book but not for casual readers

The book is an easy read on how the ills of the human body were perceived in antiquity. However, for those who do not hold much interest in that direction, the book may look like an uphill task to go through. The author makes it up through use of simple easy to understand sentences.

[Peter Kouwenberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

The contents could not keep me captivated as I was expecting a broader presentation. Instead, the author is going too much into detail, thus taking away the curiosity that should come with exploration.

[cee · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a very, very interesting read and i enjoyed arikha's take on humoral medicine as a sort of whole-body approach (albeit not always an effective one)

[Matt Legacki · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting overall history of medicine. It loses the thesis a lot. I found myself reading parts of the book realizing I’m not sure how this ties directly into humor based medicine.

[Darshan Elena · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tour de force of history, philosophy, and science, this book is great for folks interested in classical medicine. As a teacher, I found it useful for examining Shakespeare's language, a writer whose work I am reading alongside some students. On a more personal level, I found it fascinating to read about scientific innovations and obsessions that, to me, seemed like downright dreadful medicine yet so resonated with the times and places of their origins.

[Lacy Paschal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short book chronicles the history of the prevailing theory of medicine of the ancients ... the humours. Fascinating how they tied the four humours into practically everything, health, disposition, body size, etc. This system prevailed for more than 2500 years... amazing! Supposedly the humours ideology completely went away with the advent of modern medicine, but Arikha shows how even today some hints of the humours make their way into modern medicine.

[Ashton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe I'm just a huge nerd but this was really captivating. Really more of a history of philosophy through the lens of the human body, the book delves less into the inner workings of humours and more into the thought processes that were behind humoural thinking. The conclusion is a little scattered for an otherwise thoroughly researched work, but it was accessible without being "pop" academic reading.

[Boogoalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a dense, but highly informative book. Arikha has a firm command of her topic and offers insights that go well beyond standard approaches/understandings of the humors, health, and healing. I especially appreciated they way she traces this way of understanding of the body from Antiquity all the way into our modern age.

[Jaime · Rating 1 out of 5]

Horrible! This was the first book in about 10 years that I DIDN'T FINISH! After I was 1/3 of the way through the author was just stating who had written about the humors and when, not even really telling the reader what they said about them. I would give this book a -5 stars if I could.

[Degan D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nonfiction popular history of the humors – as in blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, or sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. (BTW, I personally am a phlegmatic and I cannot deny this clear truth, but I do wish I didn't have to be the grossest and most boring of the types.) I expected this to be an entertaining retelling of weird medical history, a bit like the Sawbones podcast, but despite being sold as a 'popular' history, it's far more academic and serious than I anticipated. It's also not particularly about medicine as an everyday practice, but rather about the abstract philosophies of the various ways history has conceived of the human body. Arikha simply assumes that the reader already knows the background of what the humors are and what they mean, and leaps deeper into arguments about the consequences of Descartes's theory of mind-body duality or NeoPlatonism's melding of Greek and Christian cosmologies. Which are interesting ideas also, of course, but not really what I expected to get out of this book. It was a read that took a lot of effort to muddle through when that wasn't particularly what I wanted to do this week. But that's on me more than on the book, which probably only needs better PR.