Download - D-Scholarship@Pitt - University of Pittsburgh

e, “bold, courageous, innovative, reasoning, and active” while women, being colder, were,
“moist, damp and imperfect,” as well as weaker and inferior because of their under-developed
bodies. 11 This definition of gender difference played a significant role over the centuries in
defining the nature of gender politics, such as social hierarchies, restrictions placed upon women,
male fear of effeminacy, and the many ideologies that have sprung from them. However, in this
thesis, the definition of gender difference is intimately aligned with thoughts about sex,
procreation, and death.
Another major aspect of Galen’s theories is his understanding of the system of humors.
Based on the ancient theory of the four elements of fire, air, earth, and water, and the four
qualities of matter (warm, cold, dry, and moist), Galen’s system of humors finds that these
elements can be mixed with the four types of bodily fluids (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and
phlegm) in various combinations to create substances within the body with different qualities and
functions. 12 For instance, Galen states in De sanitate tuenda:
Each one is a mixture of the same type of elements, [that is] of
moist, dry, warm, and cold, or—if one prefers to name these not by
their qualities but according to their substances—of earth and water,
of air and fire… But they differ in the quantity of the mixture. For
in semen there is more fiery and airy substance, while in blood there
is more earthy and watery substance. 13
Different types of humors can build up in the body, or be lacking in the body, which can create
physical symptoms of diseases or physical urges. For instance, orgasm was seen as the
consequence of the body’s need to expel the build up of the humor of semen, which had been
11 Ibid, 39.
12 Teresa M. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 53.
13 Ibid, 54.
9