Arikha - Passions and Tempers

Foundations: Ancient Insights

(Antiquity: Sixth Century BC to Second Century AD)

Cosmic Elements

Human Elements

Types, Temperaments, and Environments

Prescriptions and Priests

From Greece to Alexandria

The Naked Eye

The Breath of Life

Alexandrian Sects and Galenic Travels

Primordial Passions

Three Souls

Essences: The Classical Trail

(Eastern Middle Ages: Seventh to Twelfth Centuries)

Byzantium

The Arab Conquest

Hunayn ibn-Ishaq and the Translators

Divine Creation and Human Frailty

Religion and Emotion

New Departures

Persian Insights

Out of Spain

Remedies: Miraculous Medicine

(Western Middle Ages: Fifth to Fourteenth Centuries)

Faith and Healing

Scholasticism and Humoural Care

Old Convictions

The High and the Low

Outsiders

Bloody Treatments

Verbena, Olives, and Herbal Power

Apothecaries, Alchemists, and Amulets

Airs, Waters, Places, Diets

Fearful Epidemics

Life After Death

Harmonies: Renaissance Bodies and Melancholy Souls

(Renaissance: Fifteenth Century to Early Seventeenth Century)

Hypochondria at Court

The Black Sun

Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics

Cosmic Attunement

Musical Therapy

Artistic Astrology

Paracelsus and the Magic of Nature

Corpses, Books, and Reputations

Beauty Beneath the Skin

New Bodies, Old Science

Diagnosing Melancholy

Love-Maladies

Uterine Fury and Satyriasis

Anti-Melancholy Antidotes

Nature: Of Blood, Airs, and Reasons

(Scientific Revolution: Seventeenth Century)

New Science, Old Bodies

Campanellas Heavens and Galileos Revolutions

Atoms and Humours

From Spirits to Circulation

Harveys Blood

Cartesian Souls

Anti-Humours

Empiricism

Medical Secrets and Popular Healers

Transfusions and Confusions

Brain: Passions and Nerves

(The Making of Modernity: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

Cartesian Humours

The Physiological Self

The Sensitive Soul

Introducing Neurologie

Enlightened Thinkers, Old-Fashioned Doctors, and the Embodied Mind

Of Mechanism and Vitalism

Nervous Juice

The Material Soul

Modern Humours

Mental Illness

Mesmerism

The Birth of Psychiatry

Brain Localization

Hypnosis, Hysterics, Neurosis

Science: Contemporary Humours

(Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries)

The Neurological Self

The Pharmaceutical Self

Brain Images and Body Image

The Emotional Self

New Temperaments

Mind Over Matter

The Regimen Returns

Full Circle

T HIS BOOK owes its existence not only to thoughts and stories contained within other books, but also to friends, acquaintances, mentors, and chance encounters. I first discovered many of the books, especially those concerning the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds, in the Warburg Institute in London, where some years ago I conducted under the attentive supervision of Jill Kraye the doctoral work without which I would not have been able to conceive of a history of humours. Although much of this book was written in New York, it remains something of a Warburgian enterprise.

The actual seeds of this book were sown on a cold December day in 2001, in New York, over lunch with the philosopher Avishai Margalit, whose maieutic gifts led me to first formulate the idea. I am deeply grateful to him for that inspiring lunch, and for his subsequent encouragement. The project crystallized during a fellowship in 20022003 at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, whose director, David Freedberg, I thank for his generous hospitality and support, and for his invaluable friendship since then.

I am grateful to Leyla Selmi, who believed in the idea from the very beginning, and who was instrumental in helping me turn it into a book project. It took off thanks to the enthusiasm and hard work of Deirdre Mullane and the trust that Dan Halpern of Ecco put in it, as did Julia Serebrinsky, then editor there. Her successor, Emily Takoudes, has been a demanding, exceptionally attentive editor, and the manuscript was much improved under her guidance. Deirdre Mullane also helped me to undertake revisions, which benefited from the input of Jon Jackson.

Thanks to Alissa Quart for coming up with the titles final version, to Robert Martensen for his critical and detailed evaluation of the text, and to Edmund Fawcett for some sharp comments; to Elisabetta Mori for sharing her research on the fate of Isabella de Medici; and to Jay Weissberg for information on Mrs. Carleton. At the Warburg Institute, I owe thanks to its director Charles Hope; to Charles Burnett, the expert on Arabic medicine there, for bibliographical clues and for kindly correcting the chapter on this topic; to Ian Jones, for logistical assistance; and to Rembrandt Duits and Paul Taylor, for help with images.

I was able to discuss the work in progress on a number of occasions. Thanks to Antoine Compagnon for inviting me early on to give a seminar on Renaissance passions to his students of Montaigne at Columbia University; to Rosanna Warren for inviting me to submit some preliminary thoughts to her colleagues at Boston University; to Edna Margalit and Rivka Feldhay for the opportunity to discuss relevant ideas at the Bar Hillel Colloquium in Jerusalem; and to Franoise Longy for inviting me to talk about humours at a seminar on form and function at the CNRS in Paris. Barry and Bobbi Collers hospitality allowed me to test my thoughts on Rockefeller University clinicians and biologists: I thank them and the participants for the stimulating occasion, as well as my old friend Margrit Wiesendanger for initiating it. I should also like to thank Bard College faculty Helena Gibbs, Richard Gordon, Garry Hagberg, Gregory Moynahan, Kristin Scheible, David Shein, and Marina van Zuylen, for some thought-provoking exchanges; and the students who took my class on the history of medicine and psychiatry in the fall of 2005, especially Emily Brennan, Giulia Carrozzini, and Eleanor Levinson, for their insights.

Almost everyone I encounter has something to say about humours, and many exchanges, even brief ones, have nourished the books argument. It would be impossible to credit everyone, but I would like to acknowledge a few of thoseincluding good friends old and newwhose insights, thoughts, tips, and clues have left their mark, however tangentially, over the years during which this book was being written. They are, alphabetically: Amir Amirani, Tony Bourne, Guido Branca, Vicky Brandt, Hillel Braude, Winsome Brown, Ian Buruma, Rosanna Camerlingo, Margherita Castellani, Daniele Derossi, Larry Dreyfus, Jennifer Dworkin, Edmund Fawcett and Natalia Jimenez, Roberto Farneti, David Freedberg, Enrico Galliani, Sheila Hale, Oren Harman, Elliott Jurist, Ute and Jonathan Kagan, Danny Katz, Richard Keatley, Paul Keyser and Michele Lowrie, Claudia La Malfa, Phillis Levin, Rhodri Lewis, Robert Martensen, Zoe Martlew, Jonathan Miller, Peter Miller, Amy Morris, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, Turi Munthe, Keren Osman, Rami Osman, Pia Pera, Tanya Pollard, Yves Pouliquen, Alissa Quart, Franois Quiviger, Lisa Roscioni, Matthew Rutenberg, Joseph Rykwert, Didier Sicard, Lavinia Snyder, Rosanna Warren, Margrit Wiesendanger, Nick Wilding.