People of a sanguine temperament tend to enjoy social gatherings, making new friends and tend to be boisterous. I’m currently working with a team of curators at the Hartman Center on a new exhibit entitled: “Agencies Prefer Men!” The Women of Madison Avenue, which explores the history of women in advertising. Prior to these innovations, medical practitioners sought to help ailing patients by restoring the delicate balance of the humors and did so through techniques such as bloodletting and herbal remedies. Similar medieval practices existed right up until the twentieth century but, although we should be grateful for medieval people’s contribution to medicine, we can now feel fortunate to say that bloodletting is no longer practiced in hospitals for humoral theory has been replaced by more practical science. The Theory of the Four Humours was an important development in medical knowledge which originated in the works of Aristotle. Surgical venesection was much more common than leeches for bloodletting, but the use of leeches was still normal (Siraisi 140).
When this balance is lost, it leads to sickness. The balance of humors was responsible for both physical and physiological disposition, hence the modern use of the adjectives phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic and sanguine to describe one’s character (Siraisi 106). Bloodletting, however, was by far the most common medical practice throughout the Middle Ages, especially as it was less painful than cautery. A book called De Natura Hominis (“On the Nature of Man”) by the fourth-century Christian philosopher Nemesius was what presented the standard set of four humors (Siraisi 104, 105). It shows bloodletting as a regular health routine and the anxiety that can arise from not being able to get this treatment regularly. University of Chicago Press, 2009. What resulted from my foray into this cosmos is a new exhibit in the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room, entitled, “A Delicate Balance: Understanding the Four Humors.”, New Archival Collections at the Rubenstein Library. The four humors were a means of analyzing a person’s disposition as well as her physical, mental, and emotional health. Aristotle talked of the importance of different kinds of blood in animals and associated “hot, thin, clear blood” with intelligence and courage (Siraisi 105). They believed that patients could restore their bodies to full health by consuming carefully crafted herbal remedies comprised of stems, leaves, fruits, and nuts. Within this belief system, every person had a unique humoral …

As we can see from extant material, much faith was given to humoral theory and therapeutic bloodletting throughout the Middle Ages, not only in Christendom but in the Muslim world as well.

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