{"id":37340,"date":"2016-09-02T16:14:51","date_gmt":"2016-09-02T15:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=37340"},"modified":"2016-09-02T16:14:51","modified_gmt":"2016-09-02T15:14:51","slug":"jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-humours-and-humour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2016\/09\/02\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-humours-and-humour\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Humours and humour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-32935\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson-223x300.jpg\" alt=\"jeffrey_aronson\" width=\"92\" height=\"124\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson-223x300.jpg 223w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson.jpg 446w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 92px) 100vw, 92px\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2016\/08\/19\/jeff-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-cupping\">Two blogs ago<\/a>, I mentioned the current interest in cupping among celebrities such as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencebasedmedicine.org\/cupping-olympic-pseudoscience\/\">Olympic athletes<\/a> and actors. There are surely easier and safer ways to obtain a placebo effect.<\/p>\n<p>The mechanistic theory that originally underpinned therapies in Western medicine, such as cupping, blistering, bloodletting, emesis, and purging, was that of the four humours, which was known to ancient civilizations, such as those of the Babylonians and Egyptians, but whose development is mainly associated with Greek medicine, and Hippocrates in particular.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The Greeks called the four fluid humours of the body, \u03b1\u1f37\u03bc\u03b1, blood, \u03c6\u03bb\u03ad\u03b3\u03bc\u03b1, phlegm, \u03c7\u03bf\u03bb\u03ae, [yellow] bile, and \u03bc\u03ad\u03bb\u03b1\u03b9\u03bd\u03b1 \u03c7\u03bf\u03bb\u03ae, black bile. According to Galen, in \u03a0\u03b5\u03c1\u03af \u03ba\u03c1\u03ac\u03c3\u03b5\u03c9\u03bd (literally <em>On Blending Fluids<\/em>), in Latin <em>De Temperamentis<\/em>, each humour was either warm or cold, wet or dry, and each was associated with a season and one of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. The mood with which each was also associated was called a temperament: sanguine (optimistic), phlegmatic (stoical), choleric or bilious (irascible), and melancholic (depressive).<\/p>\n<p>As recently as the 1940s Hans Eysenck, in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/bmj\/2\/4529\/657.1.full.pdf\"><em>Dimensions of Personality<\/em><\/a>, extended these ideas to other categories of the personality, labelled introvert and extravert, and emotionally stable and unstable (neurotic). He was not alone; <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Keirsey_Temperament_Sorter\">the list of theories<\/a> based on these imaginary associations is very long. The figure illustrates some of these notions.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_37342\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-37342\" style=\"width: 259px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-37342 \" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2016\/09\/aronson_humours-300x298.png\" alt=\"aronson_humours\" width=\"259\" height=\"257\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2016\/09\/aronson_humours-300x298.png 300w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2016\/09\/aronson_humours-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2016\/09\/aronson_humours.png 574w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 259px) 100vw, 259px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-37342\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Imaginary qualities of the four humours, ancient and modern, and associated propensities<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>If a disorder was due, for example, to excess blood, it could be treated by bloodletting. Bloodletting or removal of blister fluid produced by cupping or by applying agents such as cantharides or mustard plasters (sinapisms), and the use of emetics and cathartics, removed \u201cnaughty humours\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Today similar notions underlie the removal of vague \u201ctoxins\u201d, without any mention of what the kidneys and liver are presumably failing to do about them. Some foods and medicines were supposed to possess temperamental properties for counteracting ill humours. Wine, for example, a choleric, was regarded as an antidote to excessive phlegm.<\/p>\n<p>Cultural references to the four humours abound. Ben Jonson\u2019s play <em>Every Man in his Humour<\/em>\u00a0features characters of different temperaments, such as Bobadill, a braggart soldier, and Kitely, a jealous husband. Shakespeare was in the cast for the first performances of the play in 1598. In two of his sonnets, first published in 1609, he invokes the humours as metaphors for his body and mind. In Sonnet 44 he likens the composition of his body to the two heavy elements, earth and water, speaks of the heavy tears that he sheds at the absence of whoever it is to whom the sonnet is addressed, and regrets that his body is unable to \u201cleap large lengths of miles\u201d to remedy that absence. In Sonnet 45 he likens his thoughts and desires to the two light elements, air and fire, which \u201care both with thee, wherever I abide\u201d. Left with the other two elements, his life \u201csinks down to death, oppress\u2019d with melancholy\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The IndoEuropean root UGU meant moist, in Greek \u1f51\u03b3\u03c1\u1f79\u03db, which gives the English hygroscope and hygrometer, instruments used for measuring the degree of humidity in a gas, the difference being described by TH Huxley in <em>Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature<\/em>: \u201cThe instrument . . . simply indicates the presence of moisture without accurately measuring its amount; it is, in truth, a <em>hygroscope<\/em> rather than a <em>hygrometer<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It has also been suggested that a suffixed form, UG-M, is the root of the Latin word umere, to be moist, and umor, moisture, liquid, or a bodily fluid or discharge (compare the Greek <em>\u03c7\u03cd\u03bc\u03bf\u03c2<\/em>, jiuice, from which we get chyme).Then, by association with humus, the ground or earth (Greek \u03c7\u1fb0\u03bc\u03b1\u03af = on the ground), umor became humor. A humectant is anything that retains moisture, such as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/23521561\">skin moisturisers<\/a> and substances used to stop <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/12454795\">cigarettes from drying out<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So the four bodily fluids, normal or abnormal, were humours, as were the aqueous and vitreous of the eye and the crystalline humour (the lens). By virtue of the Galenic theory, a humour became a temperament\u2014good humour or bad humour\u2014and then anything that put you in a good humour or an ability to appreciate or express such a thing\u2014a sense of humour.<\/p>\n<p>With the roots of humour in moistness, one wonders where that leaves <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/24336308\">dry humour<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Jeffrey Aronson<\/strong> is a clinical pharmacologist, working in the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford&#8217;s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. He is also president emeritus of the British Pharmacological Society.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Competing interests:<\/strong>\u00a0None declared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two blogs ago, I mentioned the current interest in cupping among celebrities such as Olympic athletes and actors. There are surely easier and safer ways to obtain a placebo effect. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2016\/09\/02\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-humours-and-humour\/\">More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5762],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jeff-aronsons-words"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . 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