Veterinary Clinical Medicine-I (General and Systemic)

HIPPOCRATES AND THE HUMORAL THEORY

The quotes from Hippocratic treatises concisely summarized the humoral theory: The human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health. Health is primarily a state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. All human diseases arise from bile and phlegm; the bile and phlegm produce diseases when, inside the body, one of them becomes too moist, too dry, too hot, or too cold; they become this way from foods and drinks, from exertions and wounds, from smell, sound, sight, and venery, and from heat and cold. Diseases arise because of humoral imbalances. For example, too much bile can produce various fevers, and too much phlegm can cause epilepsy or angina. Imbalances arise from natural causes such as heredity (phlegmatic parents have phlegmatic children), regimen (diet and other behavior), and climate (temperature, wind, and moisture conditions). Different kinds of imbalance produce different diseases with symptoms and development that were acutely observed by the Hippocratics. They described in detail not only the symptoms of patients with a particular disease, but also the ways that the patients tended to develop toward recovery or death. The course of a disease was affected by the development of a particular humor, producing crises that signaled basic changes in patient outcome. Fevers were classified as tertian, quartan, and so on based on the number of days before a crisis occurred.