Medieval Medicine: The Four Humours

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming and we are onto Medieval Medicine; with today giving a brief overview of the state of things before providing some insight into how the healers of the time went out treating that nasty cough of yours.
Medicine (De medicina) is the art of either restoring the body to health, or otherwise protecting it against known harms; its practice was not just kept to the confines of physicians (medicus) but also by what people wore and ate of their own volition.
There were three schools of medicine brought forward from the ancients into the medieval sphere; these are the Methodical school, an advocate of remedies and charms believed at the time to have been invented by Apollo. The second is the Empirical school and it is based upon using experience and experimental results to cure a patient; this was believed to be founded by Aesculapius. The final school, the Logical/rational school, was founded by Hippocrates; it is about focusing on characteristics such as age, region or type of illness in a rational study in an attempt to discern the cause of a disease, and through this knew knowledge of the cause to cure it.
So, to break it down:

Empiricists = advocates of experience alone.
Logicians = utilizing both experience and reasoning to find causes.
Methodicians = "take no account of reasoning from principles, nor of circumstances, but only actual diseases" (Isidore, Etymologies IV.iv)

From these three schools of thought we can deduce which one was the most favoured by the learned during the medieval period; as a hint, it is not Methodical.

Onto how the human body was mapped then, and the first thing we find is that the Medieval period really loved symmetry; there are four humors which correspond to the four elements. This is the basic layout;

Humor                              Element
Blood (sanguis)                Air
Bile (Choler)                     Fire
Black Bile (Melancholia)  Earth
Phlegm                             Water

It was believed that all disease came from imbalance within the four humors; for if they increased beyond "their natural course" they caused sickness. (The idea of a "natural" course in nature is an idea that permeates all of medieval scholarship, a planet would follow its natural course, gravity was merely an item heading towards its natural place, all things in existence had a "natural" direction whereupon things went smoothly and only if it were hindered did unpleasant events occur.)
There were also two types of illness, acute and chronic, that were assigned humors also; acute illness is a disease that either strikes swiftly and passes or causes death imminently - to this was ascribed the humors "blood" and "bile".  A chronic illness was a disease that was longstanding, and this was attributed to an imbalance within "Black Bile" and "Phlegm".

Finally, each humor was attributed characteristics like so;

So, you can see the direct correlation; Physician "you have a runny nose - therefore you have too much phlegm. You are cold and moist - therefore the best way to cure this is to place you in a warm dry place next to the fire".

Or just drink whiskey (Blair Athol), my preferred treatment of choice.

Next Time: Medicine continued!