Blood & Health

We've been talking about blood as food, and some recipes using blood in cooking, but now let's talk about health-related blood.

Blood was considered one of four "humors" that were the key to health and personality. I wrote about these humors before. When the four humors were in balance, health was maintained.

Hippocrates would have it that "The people who have red blood are friendly. They joke and laugh about their bodies, and they are rose tinted, slightly red, and have pretty skin." The adjective sanguine to denote a person who was optimistic or notably positive in their outlook starts in the Middle Ages. The word comes from Old French sanguin(e) "blood red," from Latin sanguineus "of blood," from sanguis, "blood."

The other humors were yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile, but blood was the easiest one to see. Galen believed that blood carried the pneuma, the spirit, which accounted for its red color. Blood was associated with the element of air, and an excess of blood was thought to be responsible for inflammation, fever, and aggression.

To rid a suffering person of excess blood, phlebotomy, the practice of opening a vein and letting blood out, was developed. Ancient Egypt and the 5th-century BCE time of Hippocrates used bloodletting to help patients heal from illness. Just as menstruation was believed to purge women of "bad humors," bloodletting became a common technique.

In 1163, Pope Alexander III decided it was inappropriate for monks and priests to shed blood (repeated at the Fourth Lateran Council), so their time as practitioners of the medical techniques came to an end. Clergy could still be physicians, but not surgeons.

Medieval art symbolized a physician with a man holding up a flask. That flask, however, was not filled with blood.What it was filled with, and how it was used to diagnose illness, we'll discuss next time.