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AS.140.105 SPRING FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE 2024
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AS.140.105 SPRING FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE 2024AS.140.105 SPRING FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE 2024AS.140.105 SPRING FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE 2024
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AS.140.105 SPRING FINAL EXAM STUDYGUIDE 2024
Health and Healing in the Classical Era
1. The Humoral System
2. The Medical Marketplace
3. Hippocratic Therapeutics
1. Humoral system is the thinking and content that underlay Hippocratic medicine – technical
aspects of how Hippocratic practitioners and authors thought about bodies, health, and
disease
a. They think about the body as containing and being made up of four fundamental
bodily fluids – blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm (four humors)
i. You eat food, digest it, then your body purifies it and eventually makes it into
the four humors
ii. Health is balance of humors – you have a unique bodily constitution and thus
a particular balance of humors
iii. Illness is imbalance of humors – changes in environment and lifestyle can
change your balance of humors; the type of imbalance and your own
personal constitution are going to determine the nature of disease
iv. Therapies aim to restore proper balance
v. Balance is individual to each person, but different peoples also follow their
own general constitutions
1. Greeks consider themselves to have the best general constitution –
live in the best environment, have the best regimen, etc.
vi. The way that people thought of how the humors worked fit into a view of the
universe that recognized a few fundamental elements that make up
everything – air, fire, water, earth
vii. The elements’ properties have to do with temperature and moisture
viii. Elements are associated with individual humors and these humors share the
elemental properties
ix. In turn, elements and humors are associated with particular seasons that
likewise share these qualities
b. Cornerstone of a system that dominates medical thought in the West for an
incredibly long period of time
c. Diagnosis is not important to the Greeks in the sense of actually trying to figure out a
name for the specific disease you have
d. What really matters to them is figuring out what the actual imbalance is – the nature
of it (what you have too much or too little of and what your ideal balance is in order
to remedy the imbalance)
i. Very imprecise about disease categories; want to know what’s going on
physiologically inside the body in terms of the humors
e. When we look at the Hippocratic text, we find that in general too much bile or too
much phlegm tend to be the most common causes of illness
i. Weather can cause an overabundance of one over the other – environment
,can dictate what happens to your balance
, ii. Things you ingest in this system become humors and thus also share in the
elemental qualities
iii. Therefore, by this logic, there was no strict division between medicinal
substances and foodstuffs because they all work in the same way
f. Humoral system was understood to explain character, temperament, and
personality
i. The humor that predominates in your particular makeup affects how you act
ii. This sort of thinking outlasts the theoretical basis for the humoral system
that underlies it
iii. Melancholic man – melancholia in Greek referred to black bile
iv. Phlegmatic man – sluggish/slow, calm, laidback
v. Sanguine man – sanguis is blood in Latin
vi. Choleric man – irritable, hot-tempered, easily angered (yellow bile)
2. Medical marketplace – how people offered and how people accessed medical care
a. Healers and patients had open access to each other with healers vying to sell their
services, and patients going out to buy and use these services (market transactions)
b. There is no top-down regulation in this world – almost entirely unregulated market
c. Many healers who you can shop around for and select if they’re accessible to you
d. Hippocrates and Hippocratic physicians are only one type of healer in this world, and
they are elite healers catering to wealthy people
i. Being learned appeals to people who can pay for learned physicians
e. Hippocratic system places great emphasis on factors that are hard for most people
to control – environment and lifestyle
i. If you’re a poor person in this world, you don’t really have a choice about
where you’re going to live or what you’re going to eat
ii. Slaves don’t have autonomy to make decisions about their health
iii. Certain type of medicine that is tailored for people of means
f. People don’t arrive at these markets as equals
g. There are a lot of other practitioners offering a lot of different kinds of medicine –
for the poor, for the rich, religious healers, itinerant physicians – different healers
catered to different patients
h. Male medical practitioners were involved in birth during this period, but we also
know that a wide range of different women served as midwives (many not
professional but did it as a social obligation)
i. There were also professional midwives who specialized in birth and did
things in reproductive health and gynecology, some working for elite
clientele
i. Competitive nature of getting business and making a case for your medical system in
the ancient world
i. Healing is incredibly public – even if it took place in someone’s house, you
have family members, neighbors, servants, slaves
ii. There’s no expectation of privacy and in fact there is an expectation that
people will witness and pay attention to what the doctors are doing
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