Temperaments In The Middle Ages

When you get sick, what do you do? In the age of medieval Europe, 500- 1450, disease was raging. Cholera, measles, leprosy, but the worst of all the bubonic plague. Millions of people died because of the bubonic plague due to poor hygienic conditions. There were not many doctors in this time, but the ones that were there were frantic trying to find a cure for the plague. The doctors were not well educated and this caused a lot of inaccurate information. Not much came along in this period because the church had a large influence on the culture and this stifled medicine development. In medieval Europe, doctors used the theory of humorism to determine if a patient was ill. If humors were imbalanced, they used treatments like bloodletting or fasting
To diagnose and treat a patient, the doctors would refer back to the four temperaments. In 450 BCE, Hippocrates described four such dispositions, he called temperaments “a choleric temperament with an ease of emotional arousal and sensitivity; a phlegmatic temperament with cool detachment and impassivity; a melancholic temperament with a very serious, dour, and downcast nature; and a sanguine temperament full of impulsivity, excitability, and quick reactivity.” This theory used the bodymind theory, “an approach to understand the relationship between the human body and mind in which they are seen as a single integrated unit.”. Each mixture created a look for the person, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic. Every complexion had specific characteristics. A person’s temperament decided what they looked like, their physique, food habits, and personality. Choleric people got mad easily, they were yellow-faced, lean, hairy, proud, ambitious, revengeful, and shrewd. Someone who was sanguine was very beautiful, outgoing, confident, and poised. Physicians believed that this was the preeminent temperament. The melancholic temperament consisted of a troublesome group. They were mostly thin, had a bad appetite, and they were pragmatic. The last temperament, phlegmatic was the most passive temperament. They are very kind and sympathetic towards others. A person's humoristic and tempermentic proportion would change over a lifetime. They could even change within a year and month. Physicians would stress the idea of keeping balanced humors because it could change your health, looks, and personality. They would try to rebalance your humors by using bleeding, fasting, herbal medicine, or a change in diet. The monks grew herbs and designated a specific herb for a specific humor. Since the monks believed in humorism, this made most of Europe believe in