The Books That Broke Through the Noise of 2020

The medical theory of the “four humors” has fascinated me for years. From ancient Greece through basically the 1800s, European doctors thought that our bodies ran on a balance of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. If you’ve ever heard of bloodletting, or melancholy, or hysteria, or “feed a cold, starve a fever,” those ideas spring from this paradigm.

Passions and Tempers gives a full history of where the four humors theory came from, how it came to be held as unquestionable truth, and how it eventually, century by century, started to break down. As Arikha writes: “This book concerns itself primarily with our capacity to make mistakes even when our questions are right: its premise is that all theories about how the world works are revealing, in the way that children’s questions about the world are revealing.” —Beth Skwarecki, senior health editor

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