Medical vocabulary

Around 2,000 years ago a successful Greek called Galen promoted the Hippocratic theory of the four humours, according to which the mood or temperament of a person varied according to the balance – or lack of it – of the four humours (or humors in the US), that is to say blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Phlegm being the mucus lining the respiratory tract, yellow bile being the digestive stuff produced by the gall bladder and black bile, the Greek for which is close to our word ‘melancholia’, turning out to be non-existent, unlike melancholia which was common both then and now.

A theory which went some way to explaining the fondness of doctors, for many centuries, for blood letting, enemas and emetics as an aid to getting the humours back into balance.

Us moderns have moved on and don’t do humours any more. But the vocabulary survives.

So we have the humour of a person, meaning their mood or temperament, now most often as just good humour or bad humour, and the derivative humorous for capricious, whimsical or funny.

Sanguine, a foreign alternative to blood, for optimistic, expecting everything to turn out OK.

Phlegmatic for slow and solid. Calm and accepting in the face of whatever the world turns up.

Bilious for a peevish, ill-natured disposition. Glum, morose or sour. Originally for people with disordered digestion.

Melancholic for sad people.

We also have a candidate word, ‘prozacias’, the cluster of mental disorders for which Prozac is helpful. Rather than grappling with tricky disease entities, their symptoms and their causes, go straight to the root of the matter, the cure. We would bury the disorders for which it is unhelpful, along with any unhelpful side effects.

PS 1: it is also possible that some people will incarnate black bile as serotonin, dopamine or something of that sort. Which to my mind would be rather unsatisfactory, as you can’t see this sort of thing with the naked eye, unlike the other three humours. You need chemical trickery to bring them to life on your computer.

PS 2: prompted by a piece in yesterday’s Guardian, to observe that it is about time we returned the Elgin marbles. It would be a friendly gesture in a bad-tempered world. It would let the Greeks fuss about their heritage as much as we fuss about our own. And we could always digitise them before they go and then print them out in some kind of white plastic whenever we felt the need. The son of the infamous earl, is snapped above. Rather than collecting marbles, he governed colonies, eventually expiring while still quite young – 52 – in India. A friend of Gladstone from his Oxford days. His best claim to ill-fame was looting and then burning the old summer palace outside Peking – which one might think a greater act of cultural vandalism than appropriating marbles.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen. 

Reference 2: A cure for darkness: the story of depression and how we treat it – Alex Riley – 2021. The prompt for this post.