miércoles, 23 de noviembre de 2011

Theory of Four Humours

Chicos aquí les dejo la teoría de los cuatro humores completa para que le den un vistazo!!!!!!!!! 

The Four Humours


In Greek, Medieval, and Renaissance thought, the traditional four elements form the basis for a theory of medicine and later psychological typology known as the four humours. They constituted the western equivalent of the Chionese five states of change. Each of the humours was associated with various correspondences and particular physical and mental characteristics, and could, moreover, be combined for more complex personality types: (e.g. choleric-sanguine, etc). The result is a system that provides a quite elaborate classification of types of personality.

The Four Humours and Classical Thought
In classic times, medicine was equated with philosophy and three Greek philosophers: Hippocrates (c.460 – 370 b.c.e.), Plato (427-348 b.c.e.) and Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) contributed to the vision of health, disease and the functions of the body. Although they had differences in general they saw health as an equilibrium of the body as determined by the four humors. Sap in plants and the blood in animals is the fount of life. Other body fluids- phlegm, bile, faeces, became visible in illness when the balance is disturbed. For instance, epilepsy, the sacred disease was due to phlegm blocking the airways that caused the body to struggle and convulse to free itself. Mania was due to bile boiling in the brain. Black bile was a late addition to disease theory and was associated with melancholy."

Essentially, this theory holds that the human body was filled with four basic substances, which are in balance when a person is healthy. All diseases and disabilities resulted from an excess or deficit of one of these four humors. These deficits could be caused by vapors that were inhaled or absorbed by the body. The four substances were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Greeks and Romans, and the later Muslim and Western European medical establishments that adopted and adapted classical medical philosophy, believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. When a patient was suffering from a surplus or imbalance of one fluid, then his or her personality and physical health would be affected. This theory was closely related to the theory of the four elements: earth, fire, water and air; earth predominantly present in the black bile, fire in the yellow bile, water in the phlegm, and all four elements present in the blood.
The four humors, their corresponding elements, seasons, sites of formation, and resulting temperaments are:
Humour
Body substance
produced by
Element
Qualities
Complexion and Body type
Personality
Sanguine
blood
liver
air
hot and moist
red-cheeked, corpulent
amorous, happy, generous, optimistic, irresponsible
Choleric
yellow bile
spleen
fire
hot and dry
red-haired, thin
violent, vengeful, short-tempered, ambitious
Phlegmatic
phlegm
lungs
water
cold and moist
corpulent
Sluggish, pallid, cowardly
Melancholic
black bile
gall bladder
earth
cold and dry
sallow, thin
Introspective, sentimental, gluttonous

 The "humours" gave off vapors which ascended to the brain; an individual's personal characteristics (physical, mental, moral) were explained by his or her "temperament," or the state of theat person's "humours." The perfect temperament resulted when no one of these humours dominated. By 1600 it was common to use "humour" as a means of classifying characters; knowledge of the humours is not only important to understanding later medieval work, but essential to interpreting Elizabethan drama"
 Taming of the Shrew is an example of the presence of four humours in the Elizabethan works. Here, the character Petruchio pretends to be irritable and angry to show Katherina what it is like being around a disagreeable person. He yells at the servants for serving mutton, a "choleric" food, to two people who are already choleric.
Foods in Elizabethan times were believed all to have an affinity with one of these four humors. A sick person coughing up phlegm was believed to be too phlegmatic, and might have been served wine (a choleric drink and the direct opposite humor to phlegmatic) to balance it out.


The Four Humours in the modern world
Rudolph Steiner, who derived a lot of his ideas from Graeco-Medieval thought, not unsurprisingly incororated the humours into his overall synthesis, here is his lecture on the four temperaments. These are associated with dominance of one or the other of the four levels of self. Choleric with the ego (which Steiner associates with "warmth", hence "fire"), the Sanguine with the astral body, the Phlegmatic with the etheric body, and the Melancholic with the physical body. The sequence is from most subtle (fire, traditionally "spirit") to most dense (earth, hence physical) elements
Steiner's thinking, being occult-theosophical based, has had little impact outside the specialised world of Anthroposophy. Of mucfh greater influence however was the personality classification of Hans Eysenck (1916 - 1997). Eysenck took the two gradations of extrovert-introvert and stable-unstable, to come up with four quadrants which could be associated with the classic four temperaments. Each quadrant is also are further divided by keywords, creating a 360° gradation as follows:

Another 20th century equivalent (although with only three temperaments) are Sheldon's Somatotypes. Additional recent temperament theories are reviewed by Richard Dagan.

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