elements, air, earth, fire, and water; for instance, bone or the eye: in both cases, he explains how these body parts arise out of the four elements. And for Empedocles, blood and flesh are made of nearly equal proportions of the four elements. That makes blood and flesh something like an ideal physical stuff, from Empedocles’ point of view. The medical application for this idea is obvious: if you’re sick, it’s because your proportions are out of balance. We find another thinker, the much more obscure Philistion of Locri, making precisely this point.
