Humour (ancient physiology), Encyclopaedia Britannica
secondary literature · 2024
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SUMMARY
Reference entry describing the classical humoral theory of medicine. Used in this case to identify the pre-modern framework within which Priessnitz's 'morbid matter' and 'crisis' concepts sit. The entry states that 'the four cardinal humours were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile),' part of early Western physiological theory that was 'still current in the European Middle Ages and later.' This grounds the description of the morbid-humours mechanism as belonging to the humoral-pathology tradition rather than to modern scientific medicine.
NOTES
This Encyclopaedia Britannica entry defines the classical humoral theory: the four cardinal humours (blood, phlegm, choler or yellow bile, and melancholy or black bile) of early Western physiology, a framework that remained current into the European Middle Ages and after. The case uses it to place Priessnitz’s mechanism (disease as morbid or peccant matter, expelled through an induced “crisis”) within the humoral-pathology tradition that the Deutsche Biographie entry attributes to him, and to mark that mechanism as a pre-modern framework rather than a finding of scientific medicine.