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Greek Humors Research Paper

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Though the Greeks’ medicinal practices now seem highly superstitious and primitive, their desire and effort put towards discovering the cause of disease and working toward curing or preventing disease are worthy of respect and admiration. With a great amount of observance and, what they believed to be, a logical line of thinking, the Greeks offered those working in medicine an explanation of why diseases occurred, the effects these diseases had, how they could be countered, and even the regions they were most likely to claim victims. During the time the Hippocratic corpus was written, the Greeks did not believe there was anything divine about disease; no gods threw waves of illness at their people in fits of anger or in punishment like many cultures before and after believed. The seasons, water, air, and regions were the reason for disease and directly affected which illnesses were most common and the probability of catching a disease. This line of thinking …show more content…

The Four Humors were based on four characteristics, each encompassed by two of the following: dry, hot, wet, and cold. Phlegm, for example, was viewed as wet and cold and was often associated with winter; the season was believed to bring about an abundance of phlegm and lead to diseases such as dysentery. To help solve the issue of possessing too much phlegm, one could either attempt to get rid of that phlegm through various methods that helped increase the fluids escaping the body or add more yellow bile, which was opposite to phlegm. These practices equate to the other humors as well; should a patient have an excess amount of black bile, it could either be removed or counter-balanced with an increased amount of its opposite,

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