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Wellsprings
medicine

Krasis (The Temperament)

κρᾶσις

You are a mixture. Health is the right blend of hot, cold, wet, and dry; sickness is when the recipe goes wrong.

The Greeks held that every living body is a blend (krasis) of four elemental qualities — hot, cold, wet, and dry — and that good health, eukrasia, is simply their proper balance. When the mixture tips out of proportion, the result is dyskrasia, or disease, which the physician corrects by applying opposite qualities: cooling a fever, drying a flux. Galen built this into a full system in which each person carries a distinctive temperament, an idea that survives in our everyday word "temperament" and in talk of being hot-headed or cold-blooded.

Where this idea shows up

14 Greek sources

Where to read it