A history of Western thought seen through the lens of medical theory and practice. What is health? What causes illness? How can illness be cured? Can illness be cured forever - conquering mortality? In order to consider these questions, thinkers imagined and invented concepts of the soul, the mind, and the fluids that sustained them. As Arikha makes connections betwixt and between science, religion, and philosophy, she has much to say about the human tendency toward patternicity, about the gaps between empirical, pragmatic healing and scholastic beliefs, about alchemy, psychology, and magical thinking.
"A humour is literally a fluid -- humon in Greek, (h)umor in Latin -- and bodily humours are fluids within a living organism. In the West, the theory developed that the human body was constituted of four of these humours, all central to its functioning. Phlegm was one of them; the three others were yellow bile, black bile, and blood." (xviii)
"Humours now remain familiar mostly metaphorically.... But humours do not survive just as linguistic habits: this book argues that their explanatory power has actually never gone away. It tells how and why this is, bringing them back to light, delving beneath the names we give to states of mind, to illnesses, and to the invisible world beneath our skin. It shows how humours have been recycled, continually reappearing in new guises, ever-present within evolving scientific systems and medical cultures." (xix)