Adamson - Food in Medieval Times

CONCEPTS OF DIET AND NUTRITION
perament, the apostle Mark, the planet Jupiter, the Lydian mode, and
the signs of the zodiac Gemini, Taurus, and Aries.
Important for the description of foodstuffs and drugs was a refine-
ment of the humoral system first documented in Galen, who further
divided the basic qualities hot, cold, wet, and dry into four levels of in-
tensity known in medieval Europe under the Latin term gradus,
meaning “degree.”3 Galen applied this fine-tuning in his books on
simple and compound drugs, but not in his description of the nutri-
tional qualities of foodstuffs.4 This was to come later when Arab physi-
cians began using the Galenic system. For Galen, as for Hippocrates
before him, drugs differed from foodstuffs in the effects they were
thought to have on the body. Drugs supposedly altered the body,
while foodstuffs merely increased its substance. “Weak” is the adjec-
tive used by Galen to describe the lowest level of intensity, or first de-
gree (gradus), followed by “noticeable” for the second, “strong” or
“violent” for the third, and “extreme” for the fourth. A further sub-
division of degrees into beginning, middle, and end, suggested by
Galen in his medical writings, would have led to a total of 12 levels of
intensity, but this never caught on in late-classical and medieval Arab
or Western medical literature.
What the Arabs did, however, was to extend the use of gradus to
the description of foodstuffs, and the reason for this is that there ex-
isted a “gray” area between food and drugs where the two categories
overlapped. Galen, for instance, listed a variety of herbs, spices, fruits,
and vegetables, such as marjoram, dill, mint, caraway, cinnamon, saf-
fron, fennel, poppy seed, mustard, squash, cucumber, wheat, barley,
lentils, apricots, citrons, onions, and garlic in both his book on sim-
ple drugs and his book on foodstuffs. The majority of these items
were herbs and spices. When the tenth-century Arab physician
known in the West as Haly Abbas summarized and systematized
Galenic medicine, he distinguished between the four different cate-
gories, remedies (medicina), poisons (mortifera potio), remedial
foods (medicinales cibi), and pure foods (solum cibus), which he de-
fined in the following way:
1) remedies in the absolute sense are the materials which the body at first
changes but which then change the body and transform it into their tempera-
ment; 2) deadly poisons are those materials which change the body and gain
power over it without the body being able to resist them; 3) remedial food ma-
terials are those which at first change the body until the body gains power over
them and transforms them into its own nature. . . . 4) finally, the (pure) foods
are those which the body changes and transforms into itself.5
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