Mary Floyd-Wilson
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2023-01-12

Humoral theory, derived from classical and medieval medicine, established that all bodies were composed of phlegm, blood, black bile, and choler, and provided an explanatory framework for interpreting illness, behavior, and temperament in the early modern period. Geohumoralism encompasses the global and environmental considerations of humoral theory, such as the climate, food, and terrain of a region, which informed early modern conceptions of race and ethnicity.

One popular strand of geohumoral theory is articulated in the sixteenth-century encyclopedia, Batman uppon Bartholome (1582), which states that the heat in Africa “burneth and wasteth humours, and so maketh them more short of bodie, more blacke of face, with crispie haire, and for them the spirites passe out at poores that be open.” Northern climates were thought to invert the process in Africa: “the coldnesse that is without stoppeth the pores and breedeth humours of the bodye,… and the colde that is the mother of whitenesse, maketh them more white in face & in skin. And for them vapours and spirites be smitten inward, it maketh them hotter within…” (fol. 223v.)

Competing with this theory of complexions was an explanation derived from Hippocrates’s portrait of the northern Scythians in On Air, Water, and Places, which maintained that cold air generated cold, moist bodies. Rather than one explanation invalidating the other, these contradictory geohumoral theories were brought together in a wide range of early modern English texts that considered how medicine, travel, and custom seemed to fashion, bolster, or threaten the northern “English” complexion.

In a range of genres, including regimens, dietaries, and geographical accounts, writers addressed how England’s cold climate purportedly determined how English bodies processed food and which foods would prove most wholesome to their constitution. In “The Description of England” (1577), William Harrison observes that England’s cold air “dooth cause the heate of our stomaches to be of somewhat greater force: therefore our bodies do crave a little more ample nourishment, than the inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withal…” In The haven of health, Thomas Cogan indicates that certain foods suit the Englishmen’s naturally hot digestion. Beef, in particular, “doth agree with the nature of English men,” despite Galen and other writers’ contention that it “maketh grosse bloud and engendereth melancholie.” Cogan adds that if these authors had resided in “our climat… they would have judged otherwise.” The cold northern air “doth fortifie digestion, & therefore requires stronger nourishment.” The English celebration of beef consumption also suggests a Reformist response to the Catholic Church’s privileging of abstinence and the ingestion of fish. As the doctor of physic Thomas Moffett insists in Healths improvement (1655), “flesh is as lawful, as pure, and as holy a meat as fish.”

Geohumoral theory informs the early modern debate over where to derive the best foods and medicines for the English body. Harrison observes that “strange herbs, plants and annual fruits” are “daily brought unto us from all parts of the world,” but with “respect of the constitutions of our bodies they do not grow for us.” The “continual desire of strange drugs” benefits only the “physician and apothecary.” The title of Timothie Bright’s text A treatise, wherein is declared the sufficiencie of English medicines, for cure of all diseases… captures a similar argument. In Bright’s view, English bodies are “greatly divers from those straunge nations” due to the effects of their region, diet, and customs. If a medicine “agreeth with the complexion of a Moore, an Indian, or Spanyard, then must it needes disagree with” the English complexion.

In The English physitian enlarged (1671), Nicholas Culpeper alludes to the ongoing domestication of imported plants when he assures his readers that “rubarb” can be included among the English simples: “though the name may speak it Forreign, yet it grows with us in England, and that frequent enough in our Gardens; and… [is] nothing inferior to that which is brought us out of China…” Despite repeated expressions of concern about the ill effects of “strange” medicaments, the “consumption of imported medical drugs exploded in the seventeenth century,” as Patrick Wallis has demonstrated.

Since, as Joseph Hall puts it in Quo vadis? (1617), God’s providence has fit English “bodies to our clime, and the native sustenance of the place unto our bodies,” travel to other climates was often thought to affect a person’s constitution adversely: “few young travellers have brought home, sound and strong, and (in a word) English bodies.” In Hall’s phrasing, the condition of “Englishness” is not only precarious but also synonymous with health. Some held Thomas Palmer’s view that travel abroad would “chase away . . . barbarousnesse and rudenesse… to establish a more humane and sociable carriage,” but, increasingly, more English writers agreed with William Rankins, who asserted in The English ape (1588) that his countrymen were “by their climate created perfect” but “corrupt[ed] their natural manners” in their imitation of other nations.

As Andrew Wear has shown, the “association of geography and health” proved to be a “central issue in the promotion and settlement of colonies.” In contrast to the counsel against travel in Europe for its corrupting influences, many English writers encouraged settlers to adapt to the New World for its supposed health benefits. Francis Higginson asserts in New-Englands plantation (1630) that: “Experience doth manifest that there is hardly a more healtfull place to found in the World that agreeth better with our English Bodyes. Many that have been weake and sickly in old England, by coming hither have been thoroughly healed and growne healthfull and strong.”

Even in the face of rampant sickness, writers maintained that the English “constitution” would thrive in the New World “once seasoned”—a process by which the English complexion acclimated to the new climate. Meanwhile, great numbers of unseasoned new arrivals not only suffered illnesses and death but also spread annihilating diseases to the indigenous population. When considering how medical discourse informs the early modern construction of an English body, it is necessary to recognize both the xenophobia and malleability of geohumoral discourse, together with the various geopolitical interests at stake in the deployment of this discourse.

Further Reading

Barnett, Eleanor. “Reforming Food and Eating in Protestant England, c.1560–c.1640.” The Historical Journal 63, no. 3 (2020): 507–527.

Floyd-Wilson, Mary. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Kupperman, Karen. “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience.” The William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 2 (April 1984): 213–40.

Wallis, Patrick. “Exotic Drugs and English Medicine: England’s Drug Trade, c.1550–c.1800.” Social History of Medicine 38, no. 5 (2012): 20–46.

Wear, Andrew. “Place, Health, and Disease: The Airs, Waters, Places Tradition in Early Modern England and North America.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 3 (2008): 446–465.