Forwards, Not Back | Aeon

A deep dive into concepts of "health" and "regeneration" by historians Jane Maienschein and Kate MacCord of Arizona State University, who direct the McDonnell Initiative at MBL.

Medicine aims to return bodies to the state they were in before illness. But there’s a better way of thinking about health.

The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates defined health as a body in balance. The human body was a system of four coordinated humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm), each of which had its own balance of qualities (hot or cold, wet or dry) connected to the four elements (fire, air, earth, water). The balance of these qualities and humours was inextricably linked to environmental conditions. Phlegm, for instance, was connected to the element of water, and had the qualities of cold and wet. Hippocrates recognised that when this bodily system was exposed to conditions that perturbed or exacerbated its humours, such as the cold and wet of a snowstorm, the system became unbalanced, in this case producing too much phlegm. His treatments for an abundance of phlegm focused on removing the excess humour and increasing the yellow bile (hot and dry) to bring the body back into balance. Today, we might identify such a condition as a respiratory disease. Hippocrates would not have identified the condition so locally. He would have considered it a condition of the whole body: ‘dis-ease’ was literally a system out of ease or balance.

Today we think less about the whole body as a complex system and more about its parts and sub-systems. Read rest of the essay here.

Source: Forwards, Not Back | Aeon