Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (Hardcover)

by Noga Arikha (Author)
Key Phrases: fato vitando, humoural system, humoural theory, Middle Ages, Francesco Sforza, Royal Society (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Leading medical minds were once convinced that health and sickness resulted from the interplay of the four "humors": blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile, each associated with a certain personality trait (e.g., black bile signifies melancholic) and with one of the basic elements of the universe (e.g., yellow bile is linked to fire). The rational mindset naturally recoils at the crudity and superstition of this ancient medical framework, but independent historian Arikha's pleasing historical survey usefully reminds us that our modern theories of the relationship between mind, mood and body rest on gains made by humoral analogy. To investigate the humors is to probe all of Western medicine, starting with the ancient physicians Hippocrates and Galen, the Persian Hunayn ibn-Is'haq, through the bloodlettings of the Middle Ages and Harvey's experiments on blood, to Mesmer and Freud and beyond. If Arikha's defense is occasionally a touch too fervent, her passion, intellectual energy and empathy are laudable . After all, says Arikha, neurotransmitters are today's humors, and pharmaceutical companies are not all that different from the apothecaries of yore. This is a stimulating work that shows the Western mind nobly grappling with the inscrutable nature of the human body. 36 b&w illus. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Michael Dirda

Some people say that the magic number is three, and some that it's seven, but there are other possibilities. For instance, Fagin, the con artist of Oliver Twist, pointed out that the only truly magical number was number one

-- and his is clearly the preferred modern viewpoint. But the ancients made a case for the number four: The philosopher Empedocles argued, according to Noga Arikha, that "all matter was divided into four opposing pairs of principles (hot and cold, dry and moist) and four elements (air, earth, fire, water)." Moreover, there were four seasons, four points of the compass, and, not least, four humours.

The humours were, in Arikha's words, "substances that circulated within the human body, much like water in pipes. A humour is literally a fluid -- humon in Greek, (h)umour in Latin -- and bodily humours are fluids within a living organism. In the West, the theory developed that the human body was constituted of four of these humours, all central to its functioning.

Phlegm was one of them; the three others were yellow bile, black bile, and blood. They were concocted out of the heat of digestive processes in the

stomach: Food turned into so-called chyle in the liver, from where, thanks to the heat produced by these digestive concoctions, particles in the bloodstream called 'vital spirits' were expedited to the heart, and from there to the brain. The cerebellum refined some of these spirits into smaller 'animal spirits.' Heat and cold, dryness and moistness affected the course of the spirits, and determined the effects of each humour on mood, thought, or health. There was t!

hus a continuum between passions and cognition, physiology and psychology, individual and environment."

This theory of the humours has lain at the heart of Western medicine and psychology for well over 2,000 years. Not until the 17th century did science begin to construct a substantially more accurate picture of human

anatomy: In this respect, William Harvey's 1628 monograph on the circulation of the blood may be likened in its impact to Copernicus's proof that the planets revolve around the sun. From then on, the theory that good health was determined by humoural balance gradually went into a decline.

Yet even now the humours leave a legacy in our linguistic habits. People can be in a good or bad humour. We speak of bilious and sanguine and phlegmatic temperaments. Melancholy, the most studied of our moods, derives its name from melaina (black) and chole (bile). In some ways, Arikha argues, the humoural view of the self is still very much with us, under o anger, melancholy or lust result in an internal imbalance, one that might lead to serious physical impairment or some form of insanity.

Though the humoural theory of health and temperament provides the connecting thread of this history, Arikha's book is also, by its nature, an overview of Western medicine. She discusses the speculations of such figures as the semi-legendary Asklepios and the vastly influential Galen, traces the impact of Arabic medical study, examines the effectiveness of herbal "simples" and other folk medicines during the Middle Ages, treats seriously the Hermetic lore, alchemy and astrology of the Renaissance, and analyzes the theory of the passions during the 17th and 18th centuries.

There are discussions of witchcraft, mesmerism, phrenology (that the shape of your head discloses your personality), blood transfusions, inoculation, the sympathetic nervous system, and the major medical advances of the 19th century. She ends with a discussion of psychoanalysis and the latest developments in pharmaceutical research. In short, Arikha offers a brief, if occasionally dense, account of how men a!

nd women have thought about their bodies and their souls.

She is at her best when discussing melancholy and love-sickness, "uterine fury" and satyriasis. For such are the possible consequences when erotic obsession upsets the proper functioning of the humours. According to the 17th-century antiquary Robert Burton, in a passage from The Anatomy of Melancholy that mirrors the erotic vertigo it describes, many lovers "are carried headlong like so many brute beasts; reason counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace, danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow; yet this furious lust precipitates, counterpoiseth, weighs down on the other; though it be their utter undoing, perpetual infamy, loss, yet they will do it, and become at last insensati, void of sense; degenerate into dogs, hogs, asses, brutes; as Jupiter into a bull, Apulei a bear, Elpenor and Gryllus into swine by Circe."

By the Enlightenment, however, when scientists referred to the mind, they clearly meant the brain. "Nerves," says Arikha, "were the humours for an age of cerebral supremacy." By the time of Freud, the humours had again been reconfigured:

"Hysteria occurred when repressed anguish surfaced like a message in a bottle, or indeed like humours within a hydraulic organism. Freud posited the existence of an unconscious driven by the libidinal humour, the locus of repressed conflicts between the parts of a new tripartite soul -- the ego, the id, and the superego, vaguely corresponding to the old appetitive, sensitive, and rational souls. . . . The notion of an unconscious that we somatized in various, sometimes extreme ways was a return to humoural form.

It was an acknowledgment that our organisms were traversed by stuff invisible to the conscious eye, that our innards were as present to our sleeping, dreaming, neurotic, or maddened selves as our skin was smooth.

And it was a recognition that, however much we shoved the terror of our bloody origins beneath the garb of our conscious, thinking minds, the mystery of our primal, humoural embodiment returned, violently or surreptitiously."

Educated at the prestigious Warburg Institute and a specialist in the history of medicine, Arikha doesn't shrink from occasionally voicing her own views, especially about contemporary health care. Modern medicine, she says, "chops us into bits. It has become so specialized that Hippocratic doctors might not recognize today a profession whose goal was the care of illness through the understanding of the whole patient. Localized medicine can work wonders, of course. . . . But ever since we realized that our hearts were pumps and not the seats of vital souls, our medicine has become increasingly mechanistic, focused on soulless pulleys, easily forgetful of our complex humours."

For, as Arikha insists, our inner selves remain singularly elusive. "A map of the brain, or indeed of the humours, can only identify features of the landscape; the experience, meaning, and value remain for the emotional traveler to discover. . . . Chemistry cannot tell us all there is to know about what goes on in a depressed individual, or in any mind; nor can it account for the sense of self. The 'explanatory gap' between a scientific theory and actual experience remains identical through time, whether the scientific theory is based on humours or on hormones."

Passions and Tempers may excite passions and tempers in some of its readers, as a good work of intellectual history should. You will learn a lot from its pages. But one of its lessons most adults already know:

However smart, creative or holy we may think ourselves, we are still fastened to the vexatious flesh, in all its glory and terrible fragility.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (May 29, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060731168
• ISBN-13: 978-0060731168
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #725,325 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, July 24, 2007

By	Mark Stevens - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is an illuminating, marvelous, and captivating book. As a work of scholarship it recounts in fascinating detail the history of humours, those mysterious forces that, it was believed for more than 2000 years, govern our bodies and minds. In the last century, of course, scientific research has discredited the theory; today, humours are regarded by many as an embarrassing artifact of ignorance and superstition, the equivalent of "the world is flat" or "the sun revolves around the earth." But humoural theory remains nonetheless one of the great achievements of the human imagination, an often beautiful, subtle and complex effort to understand our nature. Arikha has not only written a rich account of humoural medicine before the modern era (the book contains many extraordinary historical prints of the body) she has also brought to life this deep philosophical music. The many great thinkers who applied themselves to humoural theory sought to transcend the alienation from which we all suffer, to harmonize the warring and discordant elements within us and, in a larger sense, to unite mind to body and man to nature. Western culture too often forgets as it corrects; "Passions and Tempers" recovers something essential: the soulfullness of the body. "Even when wrong," Arikha argues, "a theory can help us understand, if not the world, then perhaps ourselves."

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been better, July 17, 2007

By	Don Paarlberg Jr. (Fairfax, Virginia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Arikha does a good job with a fascinating subject - an intellectual history of the theory and practice of medicine. As she shows, long-authoritative theories of the four humors profoundly influenced people's lives until only very recently. This makes the book worth buying. With such a good subject, though, it's too bad that Arikha did not take the trouble to do a better job. The book is about twice as long as it should be, and we lose track of the forest in her minute, repetitive descriptions of trees. Moreover, Arikha apparently did not consult very many original sources, and instead mainly presents a re-churning of the secondary literature. Had she better mastered the originals, she might more confidently have been able to tell us what it all means.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent narrative on a difficult subject, September 8, 2007

By	A Reader (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews

Arikha has tackled a rich and challenging subject, nothing less than explaining humoural theory, a medical model that dominated the Western and Arabic worlds for thousands of years. This wonderful book lucidly traces the evolution of this complex thinking over time. And she does a great job of showing how the model and its metaphors still influence our language and thinking today. It's a welcome addition to the long bibliography of studies that show how ancient ideas and beliefs still resonate in our time and is a worthy successor to the many similar projects produced by earlier generations of Warburg Intstitute-trained scholars. Read it if you're interested in medical history or in the many ways humans have tried to make sense of the different ways our bodies and our minds experience and perceive the world around us.