The “humorism” that dominated medicine for more than two thousand years was particularly rife with sexist nonsense that stood in the way of science, to the point where the humors themselves were assigned a gendered valence. The common medical wisdom was that female bodies were “phlegmatic” (which is to say, full of and/or ruled by the humor phlegm) while male bodies were “sanguine” or “choleric,” ruled by blood and bile. Even as doctors understood that every human body contained all four substances, blood itself was seen, medically speaking, as more of a guy thing. A man with a preponderance
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