Complexion and Mutability in Scholastic Medicine

One of the most central concepts of medieval medicine, complexion or temperament is the balanced or unbalanced proportion of primary qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry) or the humors associated with different pairs of those qualities in each human body (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile). In medieval Europe, complexion was used to think about health and disease, but also to characterize individuals, classify them into categories (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic), and explain physical, psychological, and cultural differences between sexes, peoples, and species. According to medieval physicians, complexion fluctuates not only with illness but also with age and lifestyle. Complexion is thus both individual and collective, stable and fluctuating. To account for this flexibility, scholastic physicians and natural philosophers distinguished between a “fluid” and a “radical” complexion; the latter was generally identified with the innate complexion. However, some physicians argued that even radical complexion was subject to change. This project focuses on the highly technical and understudied debates about the mutability and stability of radical complexion from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and their implications for the scope of medical intervention and what might be called medieval medical anthropology.