Caption: It is more important to know what kind of person is sick than to know what kind of disease a person has.
— Hippocrates
There are many things that we think have a long history, but in fact they have only existed in recent decades.
For example, the Xinjiang gourmet large plate of chicken, which is now every corner of the city, was actually only available in the late 1980s; for example, the trolley box we use when we travel, which actually appeared in 1991, less than 30 years ago; for example, we modern people know that the brain is an organ that people use to think, but this was not the case in ancient times.
The ancient Chinese medical classic Su Qing clearly states: "The heart, the official of the monarch, the god." "The heart hides the gods." The monarch, as everyone understands, is the ruler and the speaker. "Gods" can be roughly understood as what we call "souls" in the previous chapter. That is to say, traditional mainland medicine believes that the heart is the organ used by human beings to think, and the No.1 of all organs is the habitat of the soul.
It is easy to see this by looking at the Chinese characters that are related to psychology: "thought" is the bottom of the heart; the "feeling" of "emotion" is also the bottom of the heart, and the "feeling" of "feeling" is next to the vertical heart; the "memory" of "memory" is next to the vertical heart - of course, the most interesting thing is that even the discipline itself is called "heart" science, not "brain science".
By the way, the head is the place where the meridians of the internal organs meet in traditional Chinese medicine, but the status is far from the "five internal organs". Netizens hang on their lips today that "the brain is a good thing, I hope you can also have it", if you go back to ancient China, it will probably become "the heart is a good thing, may Ru also have it".
The earliest Chinese to recognize the role of the brain is likely to be the late Ming Dynasty physician Li Shizhen, who said in the "Compendium of Materia Medica" that "the brain is the house of the Yuan God", and "Yuan" has the meaning of leader.
Li Shizhen believes that the brain is the organ in charge of the activities of the higher central nervous system, so it is called the "House of the Yuan God". How did Li Shizhen know this fact? Some experts in the history of science believe that they were influenced by the Western missionary Matteo Ricci and others, and some experts believe that Li himself discovered it through autopsy. But through these arguments, we can also learn that the West has discovered the real role of the brain before Li Shizhen.
In ancient Greece, the initial situation was similar to that of China, and Aristotle, after elaborating on the form and definition of the existence of the soul, firmly pointed out that the heart is the organ used by human beings to think, and it is also the source of knowledge and vitality, because the heart can exude passion every moment of beating. The soul, no doubt, inhabits the heart, and as for the brain, it is just a cooling radiator of the heart — perhaps Aristotle guessed it because every time the heart beats faster, it is often accompanied by the "fever" of the brain.
Obviously this time he guessed wrong again, Aristotle, why is it always you who are wrong...
However, a little earlier than Aristotle, ancient Greece had already proposed the "brain thinking center", and this person was Hippocrates, who was revered as the "father of medicine" in the West.
As you know, Hippocrates' greatest contribution was in the field of medicine, and his Hippocratic Oath was the first professional ethics for medical practitioners in the ancient West to follow, and it is still an important part of medical students on the first day of class. However, his contributions to psychology are also very important, and he is revered as one of the originators of psychology.
Statue of Hippocrates
Hippocrates lived in ancient Greece, still at the point of demarcation between ignorance and civilization, and when people were sick, the first object they wanted to turn to was religion, the second was witchcraft, and the third was the turn of the doctor. Also due to the influence of religion and witchcraft, human dissection in that era was a forbidden practice. So what do doctors rely on to understand the structure of the human body? By guessing.
In order to obtain first-hand information about the human body, and to save countless lives, Hippocrates bravely broke through the shackles of the ban and began to perform secret human dissections, including not only the internal organs, but also the skull and brain. In Hippocrates' masterpiece", "Skull Trauma", he described in detail the human body suffered from skull trauma and brain damage, and even proposed detailed methods for craniotomy for patients. Of course, under the sanitary conditions at that time, this kind of craniotomy could only be on paper...
One of the windfalls from studying skull trauma is that Hippocrates found that when the head is injured, especially the brain, people's mental state and consciousness are affected, and even mental disorders become psychotic. So he boldly asserted that the brain was the supreme thought and spiritual center of the human body, and that it was more suitable as a dwelling place for the soul than the heart—but hippocrates, as a materialist, did not believe in the ethereal soul, preferring to believe in "bodily fluids" rather than the heart.
Hippocrates wrote, "One should know that our pleasures, joys, laughter and jokes, as well as our sorrows, pains, sorrows, and tears, come from the brain, and only from the brain—the brain from which we experience all these things, because at this time it is in an abnormal state of heat, coldness, dampness, or dryness—madness comes from its damp state." When the brain is in an abnormal wet state, it moves because it needs to, when it moves, neither sight nor hearing can settle down, what we hear and see for a while is this, the next moment it becomes that, and the tongue speaks in accordance with what it sees or hears at any time. However, when the brain is in a quiet state, a person becomes smart. The destruction of the brain is not only due to mucus, but also to the effect of bile. You might as well distinguish the two in this way: those who go mad with mucus are mostly quiet, neither shouting nor fooling around; those who are sick from bile are most likely noisy, do bad things, and are restless; and when the brain has cooled down and contracted differently from the norm, the patient suffers from unexplained depression and depression. These conditions are caused by mucus, and it is these conditions that cause the loss of memory. ”
The theory of humors was the unique art of Hippocrates, and his theory was originally used to resist the popular "god-given theory of disease"—that is, the belief that diseases originated from the will of the gods and could not be cured without healing. Hippocrates refuted this fallacy by arguing that each person has four different kinds of body fluids flowing through the body, namely blood, mucus (phlegm), yellow bile (yellow bile) and black bile (black bile), because the four body fluids account for different proportions in the human body, human beings present a variety of different physical states and temperament types, and the disease is caused by the imbalance of the four liquids. So why are the four liquids unbalanced? Because the human body is stimulated by the outside world!
Fan diagram of the correspondence between the four bodily fluids and the four elements
Philosophically, Hippocrates' doctrine of the four-body fluid is inherited from the four-element theory of "earth, fire, water, and wind" by another great Greek philosopher, Empedocles—the four bodily fluids correspond to the four elements that make up the world: blood corresponds to air, mucus corresponds to water, black bile corresponds to earth, and yellow bile corresponds to fire. From our point of view today, both the four-element theory and the four-body fluid theory are absurd fallacies, but more than two thousand years ago, it was not easy for them to realize that the world and the human body are composed of matter, and to construct a whole set of self-justifying theories!
Hippocrates' four-body fluid theory is not only a medical theory, but also a psychological theory. In the book "On the Nature of Man", he believes that not only the physical condition, but also the "temperament" and "personality" of the person are determined by bodily fluids, and it is precisely because of the different proportions of the four bodily fluids in the human body that people have four different types of temperament:
People with the highest proportion of blood in the human body, the personality is more enthusiastic and lively, but more capricious, careless and impetuous, called polychrome; the person with the highest proportion of black bile in the human body, the personality is more sensitive and melancholy, easy to hurt spring and autumn, but often has a relatively high literary and artistic talent, called depressive; the person with the highest proportion of mucus in the human body, the personality is relatively calm, not easy to appear emotional ups and downs, called mucus; the person with the highest proportion of yellow bile in the human body is more straightforward and irritable, energetic and not easy to fatigue, called bile.
From today's point of view, Hippocrates's theory is of course absurd, and the effect of the four bodily fluids he believes have on human character cannot be discussed. But it's true at least one thing: The biological basis of the human body affects personality and mental health.
Before Hippocrates, no one used "changes in matter in the human body" to explain the spiritual world of man. In the Western world after Hippocrates, the doctrine of humors also persisted until the 18th century, when it was falsified by more precise anatomical facts. The four personality traits he summarized have been passed down to this day, and are still mentioned in people's spoken language to this day. Why? Of course, this is because these four personalities are so typical and so common that we have not yet been able to establish a personality classification system that can be more straightforward and easy to understand than it.
For example, the four-person group of masters and apprentices in "Journey to the West" perfectly fits the four personality traits summarized by Hippocrates: the straightforward and grumpy Sun Wukong is bile, the careless and enthusiastic Pig Eight Precepts is multi-blood, the sensitive and melancholy Tang monk is depressed, and the silent and calm sand monk, of course, is mucus.
Poster of the 82nd edition of the TV series Journey to the West
For example, the four protagonists in the classic TV series "Huan Zhu Ge Ge" of that year, the noisy little swallow is undoubtedly multi-bloody, the Ziwei who always cries her nose is obviously depressed, the calm and reliable big brother Falcon is mostly mucus, and the blunt and capable five brothers, of course, are bile...
Stills from "Huan Zhu Ge Ge"
You see, in the stories where the characters are more distinctly portrayed, whether they are ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign, we usually see these four typical personalities. If Qiong Yao may have been influenced by the Hippocratic doctrine, then Wu Cheng'en, who lived in the Ming Dynasty, is unlikely to be exposed. To this day, we have long forgotten the meaning of the names of these four personalities, and regard themselves as the four most typical personality characteristics.
In modern times, Pavlov, one of the great Russian physiologists and founders of modern psychology, developed the theory of higher neural activity types of humans and animals on the basis of his "dog abuse experiment", and he believed that people have two basic neural processes of "excitement" and "inhibition", which have the three attributes of strength, balance and flexibility.
Their different combinations can make up a variety of nerve types, but the most common are 4: weak type; strong and unbalanced type; strong and balanced flexible type; strong and balanced inert type.
It is unbelievable that these four nerve types can perfectly correspond to the 4 temperaments in hippocratic humor theory: depressive, bile, polypotential, and mucous! Pavlov proved thousands of years later how great Hippocrates really was.
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Source: Origin Reading
EDIT: Hidden Idiot