How do you treat the Four Humours?
How do you treat the Four Humours?
Humoural Treatments Many treatments involved trying to restore the balance of the Four Humours. Blood-letting (phlebotomy): Methods including cupping, leeches and cutting a vein. Purging: Patients were given emetics (to make them vomit) or laxatives (to empty the bowels).
What are bodily humors?
According to humoralism, four bodily fluids—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—determined a person’s temperament and an imbalance led to certain sicknesses dependent upon which humors were in excess or deficit. The humors were connected to celestial bodies, seasons, body parts, and stages of life. Enlarge Image.
What is blood in the Four Humours?
As blood (or sanguine) was one of the four humours, it was understood that an excess of blood could lead to imbalanced humours and, therefore, to sickness. Naturally, blood would be let via leeches, to reduce the amount of blood in the diseased body and restore balance to the humours.
How do you balance your humor?
Classical medicine was all about balancing these humors by changing diet, lifestyle, occupation, climate, or by administering medicine. A cold and wet cucumber might help to redress the balance in a feverish individual, as might bloodletting. This was as true for mental illness as it was for somatic diseases.
How do you balance humor?
How can I balance my humor?
Who thought imbalance of the 4 humors caused sickness?
Greek physician Hippocrates (ca. 460 bce—ca. 370 bce and his successors espoused a system of medicine called “the theory of the four humors.” When these humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood were in balance within the patient, health prevailed; when they were out of balance in some way, disease took over.
When did people stop believing in humors?
Humorism began to fall out of favor in the 1850s with the advent of germ theory, which was able to show that many diseases previously thought to be humoral were in fact caused by microbes.
