 Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can't fit into the main videos. Today, an extra bit of information from my video about what is a recipe, and if you haven't seen that, click on the card. When I talked about ancient medicine in that video, I mentioned the basics of the theory of the humors, so here's a little bit more about those four humors. Let's start with blood. The Greeks called it haima, from which we get words such as hemorrhage, the bursting forth of blood, and hemoglobin, a component of blood. The Romans called it sanguis, one of the two main words for blood, this one for blood inside the body which gives us words such as sanguin, the temperament associated with this humor. The other word for blood, cruror, refers to blood from a wound coming from a root that meant raw flesh, and is related to such words as crude, cruel, pancreas, and raw. In case you're wondering, our English word blood comes from a root that means swell, gush, or spurt, lovely, and in turn from a deeper root meaning thrive, or bloom. Blood was associated with the spring and the element air of the four classical elements, earth, air, fire, and water. It was associated as well with the liver, makes sense, and was considered to have the qualities warm and moist, again makes sense. The next humor, yellow bile, was called by the Greeks, ketrini chole, the word chole giving us choleric, the temperament associated with yellow bile, and also distantly related to the word yellow. Bile we get from the Roman term billis. According to the humorists, yellow bile was associated with summer, fire, and the gallbladder, and was considered to have the qualities warm and dry. Excess of yellow bile could produce aggression and anger. Next, black bile in Greek is malena chole, from which we get the word for the corresponding temperament melancholy. That first word, malena, by the way, comes from Greek mellas, meaning black, and also gives us the word melanin. Black bile was associated with autumn, earth, and the spleen, and was considered to have the qualities cold and dry. Black bile was thought to produce depression, or what was called melancholy. And finally, we have the phlegma in Greek, which was associated with winter, water, the brain, and lungs, and was considered cold and moist. Surprisingly, it produced the temperament phlegmatic, a word we still have with a sense of apathetic. By the way, phlegm comes from a Proto-Indo-European root that means burn, shining, or white, which perhaps oddly gives us the colour words black and blue, as well as the more obvious bleach and blonde. This etymology may seem at odds with the associations of cold and moist, but probably has more to do with the colour. So the ancient or medieval physician Slash Cook would have to keep in mind all these associations when preparing food. So for instance, a winter sauce would use hot and dry spices, such as mustard, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, and cloves, to keep one healthy in those cold months. But such hot, dry spices would be avoided in the summer. If a patient was reckoned to have an excess of a particular humour, foods with the opposite qualities would be prescribed. So the proper menu had to include the appropriate recipes, and the right food was just with the doctor ordered. As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people on the Endless Knot podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms, as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!