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Good Humour, Good Health

No change in size, 12:59, 26 September 2020
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Before we discuss the practical side of humoral dietetics, I'd like to give you a bunch of names and dates related to the history of the theory I've just summarised. If you're easily bored by such details, then you can just skip this section.
If you're still here, then I'm inviting you to yet another voyage and time and spice, all the way to Croton, a Greek town at the tip of the Italian bootBoot, in the earlier half of the 5th century BCE. The town's intellectual and religious life is dominated by the sect of Pythagoreans. Yes, this is a time when celebrity mathematicians are a thing. Sadly, after '''Pythagoras''' had died, his followers were quick to turn his science into a dogmatic religion, which they observe by worshipping numbers and by refraining from eating meat and legumes. Instead of elegant mathematical proofs, they're now content with "the Master said so" as an argument. A few, however, preferring to think for themselves, have managed to wriggle themselves out of the cult. Among them is '''Empedocles of Acraga''', a Greek colony on Sicily. What he's particularly interested in is the structure of matter. Earlier thinkers, who lived in Ionia on the western shore of what will once be called Turkey, were trying to identify the primordial substance, from which all other matter derives, proposing various specific elements: '''Thales of Miletus''' suggested water; '''Heraclitus of Ephesus''', fire; '''Xenophanes of Colophon''', earth… Empedocles, who proved the existence of air in a simple experiment with a water clock, tried to reconcile them all by proposing not one, but four primordial substances, that is, ''earth, water, air'' and ''fire''. It will take one more generation for Plato to add ''aether'' to this number, so that he can assign to each of the five elements one of the five regular polyhedra, including the recently discovered icosahedron.
<nomobile>[[File:Anagni 2.JPG|thumb|left|Yes another infographic illustrating the relations between elements and seasons (outer circles), and humours and stages of human life (inner circles enclosing a human figure). This one comes from the 13th century and can be found on the ceiling of a crypt in the cathedral of Anagni, Italy. On the wall below you can see Hippocrates (ca.&nbsp;460&nbsp;BCE – ca.&nbsp;370&nbsp;BCE) conferring with Galen (129&nbsp;CE – ca.&nbsp;216&nbsp;CE).]]</nomobile>

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