Genius, Madness and... Bile?

Think Tank #62

What do you do when things start to feel dull?

Depending on who you ask, you’ll get a number of different answers, ranging from ‘exercise’ to ‘find Jesus’ to ‘go to the doctor for a prescription.’

The reason all of these solutions have their advocates is that they work, at least for a little while. After all, the root cause of that nagging ennui that follows us wherever we go is staleness. Boredom. Any time we shake up our routine—either by picking up a hobby or a new boyfriend or girlfriend or a new addiction—we momentarily outrun this nagging threat.

Of course, it never lasts.

I’ve always assumed this kind of existential dread was a modern problem. A symptom of our voluntary imprisonment in our workplaces and our homes.

Perhaps it is, if you define ‘modern’ fairly liberally. The problem can be traced back to at least 2,500 years ago—to ancient Greece, in fact. Hippocrates (who you might know as the namesake of the Hippocratic Oath) had a whole theory about it.

According to the ancient Greeks, diseases stem from an imbalance of the four ‘humors’: the bodily fluids blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.

According to Hippocrates, your temperament was determined by which of these fluids you had too much of. An anxious (or bilious) temperament, for example, was caused by an overabundance of yellow bile. Depression, or ‘melancholia,’ was caused by an excess of black bile.

The cure for any ailment (whether physical or mental) was to find equilibrium—strike a healthy, equal balance of all of the humors in one’s body.

Is your ‘baseline’ mood a case of the blues? Perhaps your body just makes a lot of black bile. Sucks, right?

Maybe not. I’m sure you’ve heard of Aristotle. Well, he expanded on this idea, hypothesizing a link between a preponderance of black bile and extraordinary intelligence.

I know—if you’re an arrogant bastard like me, you’re loving this.

What I find interesting is that our modern conception has gotten a lot more sophisticated, but it hasn’t really changed all that much. Now, instead of calling it ‘melancholy,’ we call it ‘depression,’ and instead of blaming it on an imbalance of humors, we call it a chemical imbalance of the brain.

In other words, we still don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

Don’t despair, though. We might not have a cure yet, but there is a silver lining in all of this. If you find yourself oscillating between optimism and despondency, Aristotle might have called you a genius.