Hi yall 👋, welcome to psycology write up, I’ve started reading this psycology book and I’m trying to be a schollar learrning about what I read through some quick analysis, and rewrite from my own understanding and words. 🏫
So back in the day, the Egyptians had theory that our body has 4 “humors” which can be roughly translated to core fluid, or “dịch khí”. These include the blood (sanguine), yellow bile (choleric), black bile (malencholic) and phlegm (phlegmatic).
Later this theory was extended to cover psycology by Galen, he basically explains that the quantity and ratio of these fluids determines the “temperament” and mental tendency of a person.
In which
- Blood - extroversion, positivity, energy, confident, happy 😸
- Yellow bile (mật vàng) - anger 💢
- Black bile (mật đen) - quiet, nice, firm - but sometimes also slow and shy 😊
- Phlegm (Đờm) - calmness, these people also have a tendency for art and beauty, as well as having tendency for sadness and fear 😿
And later he also extend this out to be so: every person starts out with some pre-dominant fluid which determines their personality trait, for example they can be energetic and positive with lots of blood, but also selfish and such. And later he uses this to explain temperament disorder, where the imbalance of these fluid leads to undesirable traits or mental disorder.
I’ll use an example of the book here.
“A person that is selfish could be due to being too positive, too self centered and haivng too much bllod, so the cure is to decrease meat intake, OR -BLOOD LETTING 🩸to reduce their blood level”
That’s why one of the methods to “treat” mental disorder back then was bloodletting, or draining other fluids out of the body to recalibrate and re-balance the system. Of course, as mentioned in the example, this could also be done through friendlier terms such as dieting and excercising, so that our body could intake and re-balance these fluid itself, but none the less, it’s quite an interesting take of how backthen blood letting was the go to option 💡.
Of course this theory of humors and temperament later fell out of favor and now no longer belongs to the legitimate branch of psycology, so don’t try this at home 😸