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Humoral Doctrine

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Humoral Doctrine Being Hippocratic ... Climate, topography, orientation of buildings (something like feng shui) ... reflecting Closed System thinking B ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Humoral Doctrine


1
Humoral Doctrine
  • Being Hippocratic but still feeling good
    about yourself
  • Empedocles, ca.492 B.C.- ca.432 B.C.,
    was the real culprit

2
What Is IT?
  • This Doctrine about the makeup of the
    Universe dominated Western thinking from
    Classical Greek Roman times until the
    Enlightenment.
  • Earth, Air, Fire, and Water comprise the
    basic elements of virtually everything.

3
Where Was This Localized?
4
To Be More Specific. . .
5
Humoral Matrix
  • Hot Cold
  • Moist
  • Dry

Air Jupiter Blood Spring Sanguine Water Moon or Venus Phlegm Winter Phlegmatic
Fire Sun or Mars Yellow Bile Summer Choleric Earth Saturn Black Bile Autumn Melancholic
6
Medieval Manuscript of the Four Humors


The Four Humors were tied to four
basic temperaments(above,clockw
ise) phlegmatic, sanguine melancholic and
choleric.
7
Health-Medical Applications
  • Isonomia, imbalance, in the proportional
    relationship of the humors results in maladies
    suffered by human beings.
  • Restoration of proper proportions is the goal of
    medical diagnosis and treatment.

8
Sources of Imbalance
  • Diet Foods (especially herbs) and drink
  • Location Climate, topography, orientation of
    buildings (something like feng shui)

9
Remedies for Isonomia
  • Implementing the principle of oppositions could
    cure humoral imbalance
  • Heat could be countered by cold dryness by
    moisture, etc.
  • (by complementing excess humors with their
    opposites a kind of equilibrium would be
    achieved or, one could think of it as one humor
    cancels out the other)

10
Cases In Point
  • If it was a fever --a hot, dry disease-- the
    cause was yellow bile. So, the doctor would try
    to increase its opposite, phlegm, by prescribing
    cold baths. If the opposite situation prevailed
    (as in a cold), where there were obvious
    symptoms of excess phlegm production, the
    regimen would be to bundle up in bed and drink
    wine.

11
Cases in Point (Continued
  • If this didn't work the next course would be
    with drugs, often hellebore, a potent poison that
    would cause vomiting and diarrhea, "signs" the
    imbalanced humor was eliminated.

12
Considerations for Dietary Effectiveness
  • Occupation of the individual
  • Age of the individual children hot and moist
    youths hot and dry adults dry and cold old
    people moist (or dry) and colde.g., cold foods
    recommended for children
  • Physique thin people told to eat moist foods
    fat people told to eat dry foods
  • Seasonality winter foods could be hotter,
    stronger, drier, e.g., grain, meat, undiluted
    wine summer foods could be cold and moist,
    e.g., wholemeal bread, vegetables and water
    intermediate seasons intermediate foods

13
Dietary Effectiveness, continued
  • Gender of the individual women, considered moist
    and cold, partly because of purging the heat from
    their bodies every month men, considered dry and
    hot because they use a more active regimen, so
    that they are well warmed and dried

14
Some Dietary Prescriptions and Proscriptions
  • Old Men Must not eat much of starches or
    cheese hard-boiled eggs snails onions beans
    pig-meat snakes ospreys flesh of venison,
    goats, or cattle. Suitable are fowls birds that
    do not live in swamps, rivers, and pools bread.

15
Sociocultural Implications
  • Justification for conquest and hierarchy (see
    next slide)
  • Impeded physiological research and advancement of
    medical science
  • Made possible the excellence of Arabic culture in
    medicine and other areas
  • Related to the preceding Indirect component of
    Middle Eastern dominance in Science generally
    during Europes Dark Age

16
Great Chain Of Being
17
An Old World Export To The New In The Columbian
Exchange
  • Pervasive idea of duality (male-female
    night-day up-down East-West. . . )leant itself
    to the Humoral Doctrine
  • Doctrine itself is simplified by dropping out
    dry-moist opposition so it becomes
  • The Hot-Cold Doctrine

18
Partial List of Hot Cold Foods
Hot Items Beef Garlic Pork Peanuts Goat Avocado Hen Coffee Oil Chocolate Honey Tobacco Wheat Beans Epazote Rue Basil Ice Most Chilis Figs Distilled Drinks Cold Items Rabbit Pork Lard Duck Beer Milk Eggs Salt Maize\ Rice Squash Barley Tomato Lime Pears Oranges Coconuts Coriander Celery Pineapple Potato Cucumber Mallow
19
A Note About Hot and Cold Foods
  • Food and drink were thought to require greater or
    lesser amounts of cooking in the stomach, i.e.,
    as part of the digestive process
  • Foods classified as Hot required less cooking
    than foods classified as Cold (cold foods,
    then, should be eaten earlier in the day since
    they take longer to cook than hot foods)

20
A Further Note
  • Foods were, therefore, classified asHot and
    Cold without respect to either their
    temperature or spiciness, i.e., without reference
    to empirical characteristics
  • Caliente or picante, for example, had nothing to
    do with a foods classification as Hot

21
Patterns in Hot/Cold Food Classification
  • Hot herbs are more than twice as common as cold
    herbs
  • Garden vegetables are overwhelmingly cold
  • Indigenous Mexican fruits tend to be hot while
    European fruits tend to be cold

22
What Is Its Conceptual Importance and Impact?
  • A. It epitomizes Linear Logic
  • (Teleological Functionalism, or
  • Cause-Effect Relationship Statements)
    X Y
  • B. It exemplifies Reductionism
  • C. It represents Deterministic
  • Explanations
  • D. It illustrates (by negative example)
    the importance of the Scientific
  • Method in data gathering and
    analysis

23
What Did It Do To Us?
  • A. It trapped us into a Which
  • Comes First, the Chicken or the
  • Egg Mentality If X causes Y, where
  • did X come from?B. It reinforced
    over-simplification
  • of complex phenomena
  • C. It justified stereotyping and
  • D. It treated the Individual,
    Society,
  • and Culture as homologous and
    isomorphic, which they are not

24
Why Should We Care?
  • A. Reductionism and Determinism are invariably
    oversimplified models of reality. Frequently
    they are also tautological, reflecting Closed
    System thinking
  • B. Explanation and argument of the Humoral
    Doctrine type trivializes the importance of
    empiricism, and the Comparative and Scientific
    Methods of inquiry

25
Dont Throw the Baby Out With The Bath
  • A. Is Teleological Functionalism totally
    incorrect and/or useless?
  • B. Is there something that, in general,
  • is more accurate/useful?
  • A No If Cause-Effect statements
    meet the Necessary and Sufficient test, then
    they may be valid, and valuable

26
A. The Necessary and Sufficient Test
  • If two things stand in a true cause-effect
    relationship, then X is both necessary and
    sufficient for Y to exist.
  • For Example
  • Does the existence of a combustion temperature
    cause fire? No. There must also be something to
    consume.

27
B. Is there something That, In General, Is
More Accurate/Useful?
  • Yes. The concept of Mutual Causality appears to
    be both more accurate and usefulit more
    realistically reflects events in our personal,
    social, cultural, and physical world.

28
What Does Mutual Causality Mean?
  • It means that X and Y in a relationship may
    alternately, or perhaps simultaneously, be a
    cause and an effect of one another.
  • X Y
  • This may also be illustrated by the helix (a.k.a.
    Movius Strip) that depicts DNA. In the next slide
    observe how the helix turns in on itself.

29
Two Examples of the Helix
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