MKGIII and LEAR: The Four Humors

if you click on the chart it'll get bigger.

The Four Humours were how people understood the functioning of their own bodies and emotions. These ideas which seem crude and rather archaic to us were the incontrovertible scienctific fact of the time. For HUNDREDS of years. It was all about the Four Humours til we got to the development of modern medicine via the invention of the microscope/microscopic instruments in the late 19th and early 20th century. They were a theory of medicine and a psychological typology. The ideal person would have a body and spirit that kept each humor in control; balanced humours. The explanation therefore of an excited emotional state or an atypical physical state was regarded as an imbalance in the humors: eg an excess of yellow bile is causing someone to act rather violently--things of that nature.

I found this interesting but it may be a bit too detailed for some...

Digestion and Four Bodily Humors

Mouth takes in food and drink

First digestion

To Stomach
Usable parts are acted upon by
digestive fluids. (Unusable parts go
to large intestine and are
emitted as excrement.)

To Small Intestine
Becomes chyme by mixing with
digestive juices and fluids of meal.
(Travels through mesenteric veins, portal vein.)

To Liver

Second digestion

BLOOD HUMOR ARISES
(Hot & Moist)

Superior nutrients are taken in via
bloodstream to heart and dispersed to
cells via general bloodstream.

Third digestion

Less choice parts become

PHLEGM HUMOR
(Cold & Moist)

Normal digestion converts into mucus,
saliva, and gastric and intestinal mucus.
Abnormal digestion causes excess mucus,
classified as sweet, sour, thick, thin, etc.

Remaining nutrients become

YELLOW BILE (BILIOUS) HUMOR
(Hot & Dry)

Normal bile is formed in liver, affects
blood, and acts in small intestine.

Abnormal humor causes destructive changes in bile.

Sediments of precipitates of digestive nutrients become

BLACK BILE (ATRABILIOUS) HUMOR
(Cold & Dry)

Normal humor affects spleen and blood,
and mixes with phlegm humor.

Fourth digestion

Abnormal humor is passed out as ash
or admixes with blood humor and other
humors, producing morbid conditions.