10 Bizarre Things We Used To Believe

The human body is a complex structure made up of over 60 chemical elements. Carbon, hydrogen, zinc, and other elements all working in tandem with some unknown unseen force that drives the human body.

If you believe in humorism however, the body is really only made up of four fluids - or humors - blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Humorism is a lot easier to remember than all the different elements that make a human, but it is incredibly inaccurate.

The four humors represent the four temperaments and were used as an explanation for both physiological conditions and psychological traits.

So if someone is overly aggressive and angry they must obviously have too much yellow bile. The cure for this anger would be to drain the bile from the liver. Any reasonable person would just get angrier with this solution.

The belief and practice started sometime in ancient Greece with Hippocrates, and carried on well into the 1800s.

Different methods of balancing the humors were used throughout history such as the aforementioned draining, inducing vomiting, or treatment with less or more of a specific food.

Though the humors are widely discredited as a medical explanation they persist in the public consciousness as a description of archetypes, such as the Ninja Turtles or the houses of Hogwarts.