A Balanced Diet for a Choleric Man in Early Modern England

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.31952/amha.23.2.2

In the early modern period, dietary practice was widely understood through humoral theory, which held that health depended on maintaining balance among the four bodily humours. This article examines dietary advice for individuals identified as choleric, characterized by an excess of yellow bile associated with heat and dryness, within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical thought. Building on previous studies of humoral balance and the melancholic constitution, the article explores how physicians and health writers adapted classical and medieval dietetic principles to manage the heat and dryness characteristic of choler. Drawing on English popular health manuals and herbals, the article outlines explicit dietary prescriptions formulated within a Galenic framework to temper physiological and emotional excess.

The study also considers how these medical recommendations intersect with contemporary culinary practice through an analysis of printed English cookbooks. While medical texts articulated overtly therapeutic dietary regimes, culinary sources rarely framed recipes in medical terms. Nevertheless, many recipes produced forms of balance that aligned with humoral expectations. The article argues that this convergence reflects a shared cultural logic of moderation, shaped by the long transmission of Hippocratic and Galenic dietetic ideas, rather than deliberate medical intent in cooking.