A (DEADLY) SENSE OF HUMOR
To put it bluntly, the underlying theory on which
much of Western medicine was based for almost a
thousand years was pure bunk. The vastly influential
Salerno School of Medicine, a genuinely MEDIEVAL academy
flourishing around 1,000 A.D., borrowed from the Greeks the
concept that just as the world contained four elements
(fire, air, water, earth), so the body contained four
corresponding humors: blood (fire), phlegm (earth), black bile
(water) and yellow bile (air).<br
became the art of maintaining a humoral balance. Someone
coughing up phlegm, which is cold earth, would need to
ingest an excess of “hot” foods, such as peppery foods
or even animal blood to counterbalance the
cold.<br
complicated when they discovered that each person already had
a single dominant humor which must be factored into
any prescribed care. Therefore an excess of black
bile would create a “melancholy” person, (i.e. gloomy
and solitary) while a “sanguine” person had an excess
of hot moist blood coursing through his or her
veins. Obviously, a doctor would have to prescribe
different treatments to restore humoral balance for each of
those patients. “For several centuries, the professor
of philosophy also held the chair of medicine,”
notes medical historian James Ricci. Basically, doctor
after doctor spouted utter nonsense in analyzing arcane
humors.<br
1858, when Rudolph Virchow published CELLULAR
PATHOLOGY, replacing semi-imaginary fluids with solid
cells.<br