HUMORAL PSYCHOLOGY

Melancholic

• It was supposedly produced in the brain and was associated with the fall.

• Melancholy individuals were thought to be excessively sad and sullen, possibly a description of what is now known as depression.

• Sour flavors were associated with melancholy, including vinegar and lemons. Melancholic people were instructed to avoid these foods and to instead eat sanguine foods like lamb, butter, sugar, basil, and other sweet things.

• Melancholy could also be treated through purging, which generally involved the use of laxatives.

Sanguine

• Blood was thought to be generated in the heart and was primarily associated with the spring, as well as with heat and wetness.

• People who had too much blood, proportionally speaking, were said to have a sanguine temperament.

• Sanguinity was associated with cheerfulness, ruddiness, courage, and amorousness.

• Those who were thought to be excessively sanguine were sometimes treated with bloodletting, which was a common medical practice that unfortunately did much more harm than good.

Choleric

• Characterized by extraversion and leadership. They are often logical, strong willed, and energetic. The word choleric comes from the Greek word kholerikos, which refers to a bilious liquid.

• People who were thought to have an excess of this liquid were considered angry, reactive, and impulsive.

Phlegmatic

• Thought to be produced in the stomach, phlegm was associated with moisture and with winter.

• Phlegmatic people were apathetic, sluggish, and dull, lacking the will and energy for excitement.

• Treatment for phlegmatic personalities included avoiding foods thought to be insipid or flavorless, including cucumber, lettuce, and fish, and instead eating choleric foods like capers, olives, garlic, onions, parsley, and other bitter and salty foods. Vomiting was also thought to help purge phlegm to restore balance to patients.

Phlegmatic

Environemnt

Equilibrium

Environment & Equilibrium

Each humor was associated with one of the four seasons, and each was considered to have characteristic qualities of hotness, coldness, dryness, and wetness. Because each individual’s humoral balance was holistically connected with other phenomena—such as climate, diet, occupation, geographic location, planetary alignment, sex, age, and social class—what was healthy for one person might not be so for another.

Disease

In humoral theory, individual diseases did not exist in the way that we understand them today. Diseases were not seen as forces or entities separate from the body, but instead were understood as states of bodily imbalance.

Physicians trained in humoral theory relied not only on a knowledge of medical texts, but also on personal understanding of the patient; on the inspection of blood, urine, and other fluids produced by the body; and on the patient’s description of his or her symptoms.

AIMS

This study aims to revisit the aspects of the Humoral Theory and to prove its relevance in today’s world of ininnovation, especially in the fields of physiology, neurochemistry, and personality research.

METHODS

This study uses Secondary Data Analysis / Archival Stud in making point of their objectives.

The researchers uses the study of Amri et. al., 2013, Saville (2014), etc.

METHODS

RESULTS

The Humoral Theory is an elegant and logical explanation which explains how the body works, in sickness and in health which is applicable in today's millennium. From its introduction in ancient times by Greek-philosopher clinicians such as Hippocrates and Galen, it became the dominant medical philosophy until well into the 19th Century.

Humoral composition also defined a person’s temperament, a construct combining personality, physique, and behaviors. The theory was largely superseded by the advent of the theory of

specific etiology, aka the germ theory, and its demise hastened by a series of discoveries in the life

sciences. However, there are a number of aspects of its theory and practice, reviewed here, which

may lead to a re-evaluation of its relevance and value.

Strength

• provides its earliest personality typology, as well as an early model of the relation between bodily and psychological states.
• provided a basis for understanding the human body and overpowered religious customs
• maintains balance of four fundamental fluids: blood, choler (yellow bile), phlegm, and black bile that leads to good health.
• explain a wide range of biological concepts and illnesses, moving people away from superstition as a cause of illness toward more natural causes.

Limitations

Limitation

• led by Hippocrates in 400 B.C.E, this theory remained uncontested for nearly two thousand years influencing both Western and Eastern medicine
• the concept of humorism was not definitively disproved until 1858.
• humoral physiology started to lose ground to other theoretical perspectives on the mind and its relation to the body.
• decline of humoralist medical psychology is related to a broader reorientation of psychological thought in which the traditional concept of character lost its central position.