Humorism
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Humorism, or humoralism, was a theory of the makeup and workings of the human body adopted by ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers. From Hippocrates onward, the humor theory was the most commonly held view of the human body until the nineteenth century and the understanding of the circulation of blood.
Essentially, it holds that the human body is filled with four basic substances, called humours, which are held in balance when a person is healthy. All diseases and disabilities result from an excess or deficit in one of these four humors. These four humors (corresponding to the four elements of earth, fire, water, and air) were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood respectively. Greeks and Romans, and the Western civilizations that adopted Classical philosophy, believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. When a person had a surplus of one fluid, then that person's personality, and eventually health, would be affected.
Theophrastus and others developed a set of "characters" based on the humors. Those with too much blood were sanguine. Those with too much phlegm were phlegmatic. Those with too much yellow bile were choleric, and those with too much black bile were melancholic. The idea of human personality based on humors contributed to the character comedies of Menander and, later, Plautus.
Through the neo-classical revival in Europe, the humor theory dominated medical practice, and the theory of humoral types made periodic appearance in drama. Such typically "eighteenth century" practices as bleeding a sick person, or applying hot cups to a person, were, in fact, based on the humor theory of surpluses of fluids (blood and bile in those cases). Ben Jonson wrote humor plays, where types were based on their humoral complexion.
Additionally, because people believed that there were finite amounts of humors in the body, there were folk/medical beliefs that the loss of fluids was a form of death.
