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Empedocles regarded the four elements, fire, air, earth and water, as "the roots of all things," and this became the corner stone in the humoral pathology of Hippocrates. For more than two thousand years these views prevailed.
This humoral doctrine prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, and reached far into modern times indeed, echoes of it are still to be heard in popular conversations on the nature of disease. The Arabians were famous for their vigor and resource in matters of treatment. Bleeding was the first resort in a large majority of all diseases.
In humoral asthmas, and catarrhous disorders of the breast, in some scurvies, flatulent colics, hysterical and other diseases proceeding from laxity of the solids, and cold sluggish indisposition of the fluids, it has generally good effects: it has likewise been found serviceable in some hydropic cases.
If Lydgate had been aware of all the pride he excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been just as well pleased as any other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathology or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.
In its place the humoral theory held sway, with its good humors and its bad humors, and their bilious, lymphatic, nervous and sanguine admixtures. But that, too, went the way of all flesh. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a popular phrase, "nerves," paraphrased by practitioners of medicine as neuroses, then came into vogue as the efficient cause of these troubles.
L. E. D. The leaves of Hyssop have an aromatic smell, and a warm pungent taste. Besides the general virtues of aromatics, they are particularly recommeded in humoral asthmas, coughs, and other disorders of the breast and lungs; and said to notably promote expectoration. INULA Helenium. ELECAMPANE. Root.
No words could more clearly express the views of disease which, as I mentioned, prevailed until quite recent years. The black bile, melancholy, has given us a great word in the language, and that we have not yet escaped from the humoral pathology of Hippocrates is witnessed by the common expression of biliousness "too much bile" or "he has a touch of the liver."
Although Hippocratic medicine rested on the belief in natural causes, nevertheless, dogma and theory held an important place. The humoral theory of disease was an all-important one, and so fully was this theory accepted that it influenced the science of medicine all through succeeding centuries.
FROM the death of Hippocrates about the year 375 B.C. till the founding of the Alexandrian School, the physicians were engrossed largely in speculative views, and not much real progress was made, except in the matter of elaborating the humoral pathology.
In this way he was indirectly connected with the establishment of the Iatrochemical school. It was he who first used the word "gas" a word coined by him, along with many others that soon fell into disuse. The principles of the Iatrochemical school were the use of chemical medicines, and a theory of pathology different from the prevailing "humoral" pathology.
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