Adamson - Food in Medieval Times

FOOD IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
lated a prototype of what came to be known as “humoral theory.”
Blood was aligned with the basic qualities hot and wet, and the season
spring; yellow bile with hot and dry, and summer; black bile with cold
and dry, and fall; and phlegm with cold and wet, and winter. In time
the four organs, heart, liver, spleen, and brain, and the four stages of
life, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, were added to
the system, and fire came to be associated with the quality hot, water
with wet, air with cold, and earth with dry. Aristotle, who claimed that
of the basic qualities only the four combinations hot and dry, hot and
wet, cold and dry, and cold and wet were possible, was the first to
speak of the four temperaments, one of the few remnants of humoral
theory that has survived into the twenty-first century. When we de-
scribe a person’s temperament today as sanguine, choleric, melan-
cholic, or phlegmatic, we are, in effect, referring to their dominant
bodily fluid or humor: blood (sanguis), yellow bile (cholé), black bile
(melaina cholé), and phlegm.
The Greek physician who was the most prolific medical writer and
who influenced medieval medicine more than any other was Galen of
Pergamon of the second century A.D. In selecting and harmonizing el-
ements of the humoral theory he found in Plato, Aristotle, Hip-
pocrates, and others, he created a system that was capable of describing
the world as a whole, and all inanimate and animate objects in it. Galen
added to the system the four qualities of taste (sweet, bitter,
sour/spicy, and salty) that he aligned with the fluids blood, yellow bile,
black bile, and phlegm, respectively. When it comes to temperaments,
Galen lists a total of nine, four with one prevailing quality, four in
which two qualities are balanced, and the perfect state in which all
qualities are balanced. Imbalance in the form of too much heat and
dryness, for instance, was thought of as burning an organism to death,
too much cold was thought of as freezing it to death. Other aspects
found in Galen’s system are different types of fevers assigned to the hu-
mors, as well as the male principle attached to yellow bile, and the fe-
male principle attached to phlegm. In the Christian Middle Ages the
four temperaments were firmly linked with the humoral system, as
were the four cardinal points, the four evangelists, and the Dorian,
Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixo-Lydian modes of ancient music. As early
as the second century A.D., the planets and signs of the zodiac had also
become integrated in the system. In its most elaborate form, humoral
theory would assign to blood, for instance, the prime qualities hot and
wet, and in addition spring, childhood, red and sweet air, continuous
fever, morning, a serene or unruffled disposition, the sanguine tem-
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