Elizabethan History & Medicine
"The four bodily humors were part of Shakespearean cosmology, inherited from the ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen."
"Organized around the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire; the four qualities of cold, hot, moist, and dry; and the four humors, these physical qualities determined the behavior of all created things including the human body."
The Four Humors
Greek Medicine
Hippocrates
Engraving by Peter Paul Rubens, (S.L., 1638).
- Greek Medicine - An Online Exhibit from NLMMany foundations of modern Western medicine lie in Classical Greece, from about 800 B.C.E. to about 200 C.E. During this period, Greek medicine departed from the divine and mystical and moved toward observation and logical reasoning. These ideas spread throughout the Mediterranean world and as far east as India, and their influence has remained strong in the West to this day.
Elizabethan medicine
- Diseases - Elizabethan MuseumFrom a website created by 9th grade Honors students in 2012-2013.
Top 10 Things Involved in Medicine and Surgery in the Elizabethan Era, a Presi Presentation by Allison Poe
- Elizabethan Medicine and IllnessesFrom the website Elizabethan Era. The content of Elizabethan Era is free but solely for educational purposes. Reproduction is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research."
- Worst Diseases in Shakespeare's LondonFrom Shakespeare Online, a website established in 1999 to provide free, original, and accurate information on Shakespeare to students, teachers, and Shakespeare enthusiasts.
- First Blood Transfusion: A History"The world’s first experiments with blood transfusion occurred in the mid-1660s in England."
- Medicine in the time of ShakespeareAn exhibit in the Yale Historical Library explored medical theory and practice in 16th-century London.
Medical Heritage Library
- Medical Heritage Librarya digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Our goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live. The MHL’s growing collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number in the tens of thousands, with representative works from each of the past six centuries, all of which are available here through the Internet Archive.
In Our Time - The Four Humours
- In Our Time - The Four HumoursOn BBC Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg and guests talk about blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. These are the four humours, a theory of disease and health that is among the most influential ideas aver conceived.
National Library of Medicine's Digital Collections - Unique English Imprints, pre-1800
- National Library of Medicine's Digital Collections - Unique English Imprints, pre-1800Digital Collections is the National Library of Medicine's free online resource of biomedical books and videos. All of the content in Digital Collections is freely available worldwide and, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain.
Historic Texts
Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna, 1612.
By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
- Henry Peacham. Minerva BritannaA digitized e-version of Peacham's work from The Internet Archive. Original from the Duke University Libraries. See Melancholic (p. 126), Sanguine (p. 127), Choleric (p. 128), and Phlegmatic (p. 129).
Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1628.
Courtesy National Library of Medicine
Browse the digitized version from the National Library of Medicine.
- Thomas Elyot. Castel of HelthDigitized version from The Internet Archive. Original from National Library of Medicine.
- The Optick Glasse of HumorsThe optick glasse of hvmors : or The touchstone of a golden temperature, or The philosophers stone to make a golden temper. Wherein the foure complections sanguine, cholericke, phligmaticke, melancholicke are succinctly painted forth and their externall intimates laide open to the purblind eye of ignorance it selfe, by which euery one may iudge, of what complection he is, and answerably learne what is most sutable to his nature / By T. W., master of artes