Free Flesh in the Age of Reason by Roy Porter Page A

became, as we shall see in Chapter 23 , a hope of the utopian rationalist William Godwin). We may wish and wish, but (most probably) we won’t grow a centimetre taller. We cannot command our hair not to fall out, tell our kidneys to secrete or our heart to beat. And we are quite unaware of internal events (digesting food, making cells), unless they are giving us discomfort. The idea of intuitive, internal self-knowledge of bodies (to say nothing of control over them) is thus far more problematic than that of mental introspection. To a large degree our sense of our bodies, and what happensin and to them, is not first-hand but mediated through maps and expectations derived from the culture at large.
    Bodies are studied objectively, scientifically, not least by ‘autopsies’ in the modern sense; and such ‘outsider’ knowledge shapes and shades our personal ways of thinking the self. Central to those sciences of the body – today the range of natural, human and social sciences is huge – has been medicine: after all, our need to know about our bodies is most pressing when something goes wrong.
    Theoretical accounts of what makes up the body, and how it works, in sickness and in health, were first written down in the West by the Greeks and transmitted (through Islam) down the Middle Ages, before being consolidated yet challenged by the spectacular dissections of the Renaissance and the physiological investigations of William Harvey and others in the seventeenth century.
    Unlike the medicine of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the model of the body championed by Greek-learnt medicine was emphatically, even aggressively, secular. The body was part of a natural order which was law-governed, disease was a regular irregularity. That view was indicative of a bid by a corps of physicians to present themselves as superior to the existing mishmash of soothsayers, magicians, quacks and folk practitioners, those practising what might loosely be called religious, mystical or traditional modes of healing. The ambitious new professional physicians of Greece and Rome insisted that the body functioned within the order of nature, and for that reason was the proper turf of knowledgeable medical men: beware consulting others!
    As first recorded in the Hippocratic corpus (fourth century BC : supposedly the thoughts of a distinguished physician from the island of Cos) and codified by the illustrious and amazingly prolific Galen (second century AD ), learned medicine repudiated earlier supernatural and magical accounts of health and sickness, which saw them as god-sent. Its explanatory repertoire centred on the ‘humours’, bodily fluids (generally taken to be four in number) whose equilibrium was adjudged vital for the maintenance of life: the body must not become too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. Humoral theory voiced theGreek assumption that healthiness involved a balance of the key fluids in the body and sickness a maladjustment. It was also elaborated to explain much else: sexual and racial differences, character, disposition, psychological traits – in fact, every significant aspect of human life.
    What was being kept in equilibrium or upset were bodily fluids or
chymoi
(translated as ‘humours’). Sap in plants and blood in animals were viewed as the fount of life. Other and perhaps less salutary bodily fluids appeared mainly in case of illness – for example, the mucus of a cold or the runny faeces of dysentery. Two fluids, bile and phlegm, were particularly associated with illness; though naturally present in the body, both seemed to flow immoderately in sickness. Winter colds were due to phlegm, summer diarrhoea and vomiting to bile, and mania resulted from bile boiling up in the brain. The Hippocratic tract
Airs, Waters, Places
also attributed national characteristics to bile and phlegm: the pasty, phlegmatic peoples of the North were contrasted with the swarthy, hot, dry, bilious Africans – and both were judged