humours

Moderns like to elevate the classical era as a golden period, and the Modern era as the "Renaissance" from the "Dark Ages" -- but bleeding to balance the humours is a classical practice that seems to have been largely suspended in the medieval era, even though medieval practitioners knew about Galen's four humours, and that was only resurrected in the Modern era.

Origins of "Leech" Richard Nokes 2006

As a result of research which we can do no more than outline to you in summary fashion, we still hold that the complement of the humours comes from the white corpuscles.

Ilya Mechnikov - Nobel Lecture 1967

We don’t need doctors cutting me open to drain humours anymore than we need massive industrial terraforming to drain the CO2 out of the atmosphere as far as I can see ...

The Volokh Conspiracy » Upcoming Talks 2010

Such servants dwelled in the god’s castillion, harvesting and preserving the humours from the god they served.

Orbit Books Free Sample SciFi Fantasy Book: The Future Is Now 30 | SciFi UK Review 2005

Those men who are full of noxious humours, that is to say, full of inordinate inclination towards bodily comfort and towards foreign and creaturely consolations, can fall into four kinds of fever.

The Adornment of the Spritual Marriage 1293-1381 1916

It moves not my spleen to behold the multitude in their proper humours, that is, in their fits of folly and madness; as well understanding that wisdom is not prophan’d unto the World, and ’tis the priviledge of a few to be Vertuous.

The Second Part 1909

Generally he succeeded in seizing the manners of his own age and nation: in itself this was deserving of praise; but even here he confined himself too much to external peculiarities, to the singularities and affectations of the modish tone which were then called humours, and which from their nature are as transient as dresses.

Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature August Wilhelm Schlegel 1806

Dead bodies (saith Dr. Hammond) after a revolution of the humours, which is completed in seventy-two hours, naturally tend to putrefaction; and the Jews say that by the fourth day after death the body is so altered that one cannot be sure it is such a person; so Maimonides in Lightfoot.

Commentary on the Whole Bible Volume V (Matthew to John) 1721

So that the right use of Comaedie, will I thinke, by no bodie be blamed; and much lesse of the high and excellent Tragedie, that openeth the greatest woundes, and sheweth forth the Ulcers that are covered with Tissue, that maketh Kings feare to be Tyrants, and Tyrants manifest their tyrannicall humours, that with stirring the affects of Admiration and Comiseration, teacheth the uncertaintie of this world, and uppon how weak foundations guilden roofes are builded:

Defence of Poesie 1992

We are subject to a repletion of humours, useless and dangerous: whether of those that are good (for even those the physicians are afraid of; and seeing we have nothing in us that is stable, they say that a too brisk and vigorous perfection of health must be abated by art, lest our nature, unable to rest in any certain condition, and not having whither to rise to mend itself, make too sudden and too disorderly a retreat; and therefore prescribe wrestlers to purge and bleed, to qualify that superabundant health), or else a repletion of evil humours, which is the ordinary cause of sickness.

The Essays of Montaigne — Complete Michel de Montaigne 1562