The humors are already starting to be associated with specific diseases. The best example is “melancholy”: the word comes from the Greek words for “black bile.” When you have too much black bile you are melancholic—which for the ancients involves a complicated set of symptoms, and not just sadness, as the word has come to mean in English. The meanings of the English words “sanguine” and “phlegmatic” also refer to humors recognized by ancient and medieval thinkers—“sanguine” is an allusion to blood and “phlegmatic” to, well, phlegm. The fact that these English words refer to personality traits,
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