HISTORY'S GREATEST CONUNDRUMS AND MYSTERIES SOLVED
Who came up with humourism?
SHORT ANSWER Hippocrates gets the credit for making sure the four humours were no joke for two millennia
LONG ANSWER For well over 2,000 years, a foundational belief of western medicine was that the body was made up of four ‘humours’ or fluids that determined everything about a person - from behaviour to health. Blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm all struck a delicate equilibrium of not too hot or cold, and not too wet or dry. If they became unbalanced, however, they caused illness. This is why cures like bloodletting and purging took off.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the name most associated with such an epochal theory was the ‘father of western medicine’ himself, fifth-century BC Greek physician Hippocrates. While ever-so-slightly inaccurate, it was pioneering stuff: instead of divine intervention or evil spirits, there was now a bodily explanation for poor health. Humourism shows up in , part of the medical works known as the
