Sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic: the four temperaments

The four words are still part of everyday language. We say someone is sanguine, or phlegmatic, without knowing where it comes from anymore.

It comes from a system that governed Western thinking about the body for roughly two thousand years.

The origin

The founding text is On the Nature of Man, attributed to the Hippocratic corpus, written around the fifth century BCE. It puts forward the idea that the body is composed of four humours, in proportions that vary from one individual to another.

It was Galen, in the second century CE, who drew from this a typology of characters and constitutions: four temperaments, each corresponding to a humour.

The system then travelled through late antiquity, the Arab world, the Latin Middle Ages, the Renaissance. It shaped how people ate, how they cared for themselves, how they chose a climate, how they read a face — until at least the eighteenth century.

What the system actually did

It was not theoretical. It was operational, and that is what makes it interesting.

Diet was adapted to temperament: hot or cold, dry or moist, each food being classified in the same way as people. Season, exercise, rest, baths — all were adjusted.

And so were skin rituals. There were recipes that did not address a problem but a complexion — a word that at the time meant both the skin tone and the character, which says a great deal.

Why it was abandoned

Because the physiology it rested on was wrong. The four humours do not exist, and the whole system collapsed with them in the nineteenth century.

It was a justified abandonment, and it should be said plainly.

What was not replaced

The underlying intuition, however, was never refuted: that people do not all function in the same way, and that advice should be addressed to someone.

That intuition was thrown out with the rest. The twentieth century replaced it with a single model — one standard of beauty, one general recommendation, one skin type describing a surface condition — and today we can measure what that substitution has cost.

What other traditions were doing at the same time

They counted differently. India counted up to three. China up to five. The West up to four.

What is striking is not the number: it is that three separate civilisations all concluded that people had to be classified before they could be given any advice at all.

None of them, however, had an objective key. All of them read temperament on the body, in behaviour, by eye — that is, from what varies.

That is exactly where the old system failed, and it is the only point on which progress was needed. A reading that starts from a datum that does not change, rather than from an observation that does, does not have that flaw.