In the second century A.D., Galen reckoned that the cause was systemic, an excess of melancholy or black bile, one of the body’s four “humors,” brought on by bad diet and environmental circumstances.
The most influential theories that explain psychological mechanism of humor are superiority theories, relief or arousal theories and incongruity theories, which can explain different humors.
This idea, which Spinoza had anticipated in 1677, fit well with the older Galenic notion that the changing balance among the body humors was the foundation of a person's emotional profile.
Since Antiquity, medical practitioners had subscribed to the idea that health and ill-health were a direct reflection of the fluids, or "humors," in the body.
English humors generate from various sources, such as skillful use of rhetoric, violation of Cooperative Principle in pragmatics and ambiguity in vocabulary, grammar and syntax.
And over the years, as one medical mystery is solved-such as when germs and not an imbalance of bodily humors were found to cause disease-others crop up.
Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient's blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease.
His discovery did not abolish the notion of humors, which would continue well into the 19th century.
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