Were there ancient or medieval thinkers who opposed humoralism?

by MilesWorldbuilding
BedsideRounds

Yes. Well, maybe. Two major caveats of my ability to answer your question -- I'm speaking from the perspective of early modern physicians, and I don't have the knowledge base (or really desire) to actually tackle the ancient sources. Hopefully a classicist will be able to answer with a lot more detail. Caveat #2 -- a lot of the more recent scholarship that I've read on humoralsm (see my references below) paint a much more complicated picture on Greek views on the humors. TL;DR -- Galen looms incredibly large, and his views (and his views on older Greek philosophers) have become dominant. However, there were a variety of proto-humoral views in the Mediterranean, and wide disagreement about how many there might be, and their nature towards disease. In fact, Nutton points out that the historic Hippocrates advocated for only two humors, and some members of his school saw as many as 16.

​

Anyway, the most famous anti-humoralist of the Renaissance was, of course, Paracelsus, who advanced an alchemical explanation for human disease (mercury, salt, and sulfur). He pointed to the Greek atomists like Democritus and Epicurus as providing alternative explanatory models (which conveniently backed up his explanation) -- that rather than "continuous substances," the function of the human body was mechanical at some sort of basic level (though the aforementioned Stewart paints a far more complicated picture -- while Galen may have seen atomism as an enemy of humoralism, it's certainly not clear that the atomists themselves saw it that way).

​

The other major early modern group opposed to humoralism were the so-called Empirics, which actually became a dirty word during the 17th and 18th century, synonymous with "quack" (until the skeptical empiricism of the 19th century largely changed our definition). The Empirics were actually an important anti-humoral group during Galen's time. At least according to Galen, they largely rejected theoretical explanations for disease, and cared only about treatment effects. Again, I can't comment on the actual historic empirics, but during the Paris Clinical School, this group would be held up in esteem as acting as a Hippocratic bulwark against what was seen as Galenic humoralism.

​

Sorry, that was a bit of a mess. Hopefully a classicist can set me straight. Two books that I've referred to whenever I get too bogged down with early modern doctors penchant for quoting Hippocrates:

​

  • KA Stewart, Galen's Theory of Black Bile
  • V Nutton, Ancient Medicine