Dr Kat and The Four Humours

hello and welcome to reading the past I'm dr. Kat one thing I'd like to talk about today in light of the title of this channel reading the past is ways in which we can find tools and techniques to understand our predecessors and the literary cultural and material work that they produced and that survives to us now one way that I think that we can do this quite effectively is by looking at and understanding the ways in which they understood themselves and the world in which they inhabited I think that a key way in which we understand our world is through the science that is common knowledge while we can look at our ancestors and essentially laugh at their lack of knowledge at the funny way they viewed their bodies and the world around them I would really like to caution against that I mean obviously I'm slightly biased because I look at the past a lot and I have a genuine affection for the people and things of that time I think it's important that we don't get too big for our britches if I'm honest because they were doing the very best they could with the limited evidence that they had access to they were making a best guess in the way that they understood their bodies and how they moved in the world now what obviously the evidence that we have access to is of a slightly higher quality there's a greater deal of proof behind it I really want to caution against us thinking that we know everything so I just want to kind of caveat that Before we jump into looking at how the early modern 's and those who preceded them understood their bodies and the world around them let's think about them as loving members of our extended family rather than clowns that we want to laugh at with that in mind let's talk about humoral science [Music] [Music] we have to start with Hippocrates then in the second century we have Galen who developed theory further then Arabic scientists and theorists take it on in the ninth century and then it passes back into Europe in the 11th century so what we have is from that 11th century the kind of medieval period all the way through right up until in many just in many cases the 19th century humoral science is the mode of understanding the body that is shared by all people including physicians what was humoral science what was a humoral body and how does it differ from our own when understanding or thinking about the humoral body this is not a notion that things are I think flowing through the body it's not a kind of system of connecting parts it's almost like the body is a container and in that container is four humors or fluids those four humors are blood black bile yellow bile and phlegm and for health to be achieved those four humors need to be within the container of the body in equal measure illness or sickness or mood disruptions occur when one or many of those humors become out of balance with each other so if you for example were to have too much blood you would be called sanguine so you might be overly hot or potentially lustful if you had too much black bile you would be melancholic now we know of men Colly now that means somebody who is depressed whereas we can see that that's something perhaps with brain chemistry or situations that require some counseling or therapy they would see this as being a excess in black bile similarly if you have too much yellow bile you are choleric you're angry quick to violence you're the sort of person that perhaps gets into bar fights now if you have too much phlegm you are flat 'ok and we don't really use that word very much but if in their kind of context a flume at ik person would be apathetic disinterested perhaps even lazy now there are a few reasons why your humors might become imbalanced perhaps you are eating the wrong food perhaps you have allowed yourself to become too hot or too cold for your particular constitution I've often wondered actually if that's why when you're leaving the house and somebody says don't forget your coat you'll catch a cold which of course knowing as we do how bacterial and viral infection function that's not possible but yet we still say it to each other a lot I wonder if that actually still has its origins in in humoral science that the notion of becoming too cold could make you unwell well that's that kind of notion of imbalance that's just a thought I've been having similarly if you don't modify or correct character flaws in yourself you could become distemper'd your humors could become imbalanced there's also an element to which the stages of life that you're at could make you more predisposed to being imbalanced so certain excess of humors are more common in youth than old age they are more common in spring or summer than winter or autumn they are more common for men than women or vice versa the time of year you were born could potentially have an effect the very air around you can also cause problems because while we have germ theory they had something called miasma theory so miasma is a sort of bad air it's an evil air that can surround the body and you can breathe it in but also there's a conception that the body is somehow porous that the skin is porous so it can be absorbed into you and so bad smells can be miasma so if you're around bad smells you risk getting for example plague which is one of the reasons why there are those hot those kind of terrifying beep plague mosques they are stuffed full of pretty scented dried flowers and herbs in an attempt to prevent that miasma from getting into the plague doctor and infecting them so the carrying of Commander's equally can ward off illness the wearing of perfume can also ward off illness however on the flip side of that because your body can be opened through bathing bathing can therefore be seen as being dangerous so for a lot of our early modern predecessors getting in the bath isn't something that they're going to do they will change their under clothes their linens very frequently but bathing is dangerous because it can let you absorb in this miasma that can make you very unwell so yes they probably didn't smell the way that we would find attractive because they were universal soap dodgers but they are doing it because they believed that getting in hot water and soaping yourself off when you come out your pores are all opened you can become sick because your pores have been opened and the miasma can get him so those some of the ways that the hue can become imbalanced in the body so if your humors can be placed out of balanced because of your sex or your age or the time of year that you were born or the smells that you smelt or the food that you've eaten or the behavior that you have taken part in if you for example seek out violence perhaps you will become more choleric if all of these things can shift you off balance and you have to be constantly vigilant of course if you feel like you are imbalanced you're going to seek ways to redress that and that may be through eating foods that will calm the imbalance of the particular humor that you think affects you but also and if you can afford it you would seek out the care of perhaps a surgeon or a physician and they are going to do things like if you're sanguine you have too much blood they're going to bleed you perhaps they will give you a laxative to avoid some of those humors out of your backside they might give you a purgative so that you would throw up those humors now I think I'd like to do another video on the various classes of medical treatment that you could find yourself having access to depending on your location in England or annual social States from your wealth because I think that actually that's a separate video and would be quite interesting in terms of what you have access to and potentially how healthy or unhealthy you may feel seeking out those options so that's gonna be another video if you guys are interested please let me know in the comments below or find me on social media one thing that I think is really interesting about the understanding of the humoral body is the way in which it affects literary production now I know that Shakespeare is the writer that we are the most familiar with from the early modern period and in the complete works of Shakespeare humors come up a lot indeed the word humors appears 101 times across the works of Shakespeare humor no s appears 32 times Shakespeare's characters refer to people being sanguine four times climatic once melancholic comes up seventy times the notion of people being choleric their collar or collars emerges 37 times if you want to do your own research on shakespeare's terms or individual words within Shakespeare then a great place to look is to go to the Shakespeare concordance on open source Shakespeare I'm going to put the w-w-winking so you can go and find that site yourselves because I think that if you're interested in a particular word usage it's a great resource to use as I mentioned before there are a number of things that can alter or shift your humoral balance one of those things is your sex now while we recognize sex and gender as being separate things a sex being the biological chromosome or hormonal diagnosis of male/female or something in between and gender being social construct the way in which you encounter the world and inhabit it whether that is matching with your sex at birth or not for our early modern counterparts it's actually the inverse so gender and gender norms and gender roles are completely fixed they are fixed by the social order they are also fixed by some tree law a woman is not permitted to dress as a man because that is her breaching the social contract breaching the Suntory law and placing herself in a higher social order than she deserves to be because obviously men are better than women for the early modern of medieval mindset now why is this well man is the perfect form according to Merle science and woman is the inverted and imperfect form of man men are hot and dry they've been properly cooked by their mother's womb whereas women are cold and wet they have been improperly cooked it's for this reason that boys were pink and girls were blue blue being cold and wet and pink being the diminutive youthful form of red the hot and dry color so that together is an inversion of of how we kind of gender colors in terms of this inversion I have an image now I'm going to put it up and I just like you to pause this video on this image and just write in the comments what's this an image of perfect okay now this image how many of you thought that this was an image of a penis well you nearly right its genitals it's just not a penis what you see here is the idea or the impression of female genitalia in around about 1575 what you see here is the uterus which seems to be shaped like some testicles but there's also other testicles that are actually the ovaries and inside that kind of weird what looks like a walnuts is in fact a human fetus while this is quite a alarming viewpoint of how the human reproductive system works and it does make me fear for women who need to deal with a midwife and perhaps also explains the incredibly high rates of infant and maternal mortality if this is what midwives and doctors and physicians think they're working with what this also points to is the fact that this inversion there is an absolutely fantastic story that's recounted by a physician and surgeon called Ambrose Perry and he talks about this 14-year old girl named Marie who is chasing some pigs across a field as you do I mean I'm constantly chasing pigs across the woods myself now one of these pigs jumps a fence and a ditch or a ditch and offense I'm not quite sure the orientation of this field and Marie in a fit of vim and vigor bolts off the pig and jumps as well in this heating exertion lo and behold out pops Marie's penis and testicles okay and then apparently she goes on to grow a beautiful lustrous red beard joins the army and renames herself Germaine this is a surgeon recounting this story and what this speaks to for me is the changeability immutability of something as clearly fixed for them as a person's gender for them you have to inhabit either a male or a female body but in this story the humors can alter to such a degree that a girl can suddenly sprouts male genitals and we have to therefore ask is it equally possible for a man who undertakes cooling and wetting activities spending maybe lots of time around women or behaving in an effeminate fashion is it possible for that person's sex characteristics to similarly change in the opposite direction with this in mind I wonder what this means for Shakespeare's players or Marlowe's players the the men of the professional playing stages and particularly the boys of the professional playing stages who were asked and expected to costume and behave as women what does it mean in a world where the things that you put on your body and into your body can shift and change your humors what does it mean for the men and boys of the professional playhouses who dress in women's clothes and adopt a female attitude and go about in women's ways what does it mean for them and for their sex and gender perhaps you'd like to start a discussion about this you'd like maybe some clarification please leave a comment down below or you can find me on social media I'll be leaving the links to my Twitter and my Instagram I hope you found this interesting and useful I think it's a great jumping-off point for some other topics particularly some of the deep dives of the Shakespeare plays that I'd like to do I have a feeling that I'm gonna be constantly going I made a video about humor or science I'm going to link it down below because this explains what I'm talking about here but we shall see I hope you found it useful I've certainly really enjoyed spending time with you thank you for spending time with me and I look forward to speaking to you all next time thank you for vy4 now [Music]

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Views: 9,965

Rating: 4.9691911 out of 5

Keywords: Four Humours, Four Humors, Gender, Sex, Plague, Miasma, Medieval, Early Modern, History, Education, Literature, Culture, Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, Tudor, Stuart, Shakespeare

Id: v2eXNgMERzU

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 17 2018