humours

humours, the bodily fluids to which medieval medicine attributed the various types of human temperament, according to the predominance of each within the body. Thus a preponderance of blood would make a person ‘sanguine’, while excess of phlegm would make him or her ‘phlegmatic’; too much choler (or yellow bile) would give rise to a ‘choleric’ disposition, while an excess of black bile would produce a ‘melancholic’ one. The comedy of humours, best exemplified by Ben Jonson's play Every Man in His Humour (1598), and practised by some other playwrights in the 17th century, is based on the eccentricities of characters whose temperaments are distorted in ways similar to an imbalance among the bodily humours.