You know how it goes.. It’s the hundreth day in a row in which you wake up with a headache. You take some willow bark from your medicine collection. In the kettle on the fire you boil it with some herbs. Exhausted you sit down at the kitchen table to take little sips from your healing tea. It helps! Luckily, you almost instantly feel better. In todays modern society, knowledge of medicine is a skill everyone needs to have. We all practice it at home. Which herbs to use when is taught from mother to daughter or from acquaintances. When you really don’t know what to do, you visit the local healer. You trust his knowledge, but do you know what that’s based on? No? Time for a little bit of background information: Galenus’ system!
The four building blocks
Take a look around you. Everything in nature consists of four elements. Water, air, fire and earth. These elements have certain qualities. Water is cold, air is dry, fire is hot and earth is moist. The same way the earth consists of those four elements, your body is made out of four elements. These are called the four humors. The humors are phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile. As the elements of the earth have qualities, so do humors. Phlegm is cold and moist, blood is hot and moist, yellow bile is hot and dry and black bile is cold and dry. But why is it useful to know the system by Galenus?
Well, it tells a lot! The purpose of the body is to balance all the different humors. There can’t be more of one of the liquids, because that is what causes illness. If, for instance, you have too much blood, you’re too hot and moist. You could balance your humors in that case by letting some blood, or you could look into dietary solutions. Like I said before, everything in nature has these qualities; hot, cold, moist or dry. This is true for foods too. So if you’re too hot and moist, you need to eat a plant which in itself is cold and dry! It’s all very logical.
Humors and your mood
Did you know humors affect your emotional wellness too? This is also called your temperament. Every person has their own perfect balance; lots of woman have a little more phlegm, and men more blood. Phlegm is associated with calmness, attention, rational thinking and loyalty. Blood is associated with energy, carelessness and impulsiveness. But whatever you do, make sure you don’t get too much black bile (depressed, serious, paranoid) or yellow bile (hot-spirited, selfish, ambitious). To prevent this from happening, make sure you don’t get too dry, because that’s what those two humors have in common!
Further reading:
Are you interested in the qualities of flora and fauna? Take a look at the Tacuinum Sanitatis