The word "bile" is sometimes used to mean "anger" or "bitterness," because centuries ago people believed that these feelings were controlled by bodily fluids called "black bile" and "yellow bile." But your bile has nothing at all to do with anger or any other emotion.
Her mum, Claire Deyes, knew something was wrong when she started throwing up yellow bile and had stomach pains - Libbie had suffered significant internal damage and a perforated bowel.
Towards the end of the fifth century BCE, the Hippocratic On the Nature of Man listed black bile as a fundamental substance in the body, alongside blood, phlegm, and yellow bile, says Stewart, but later medical writers did not mention it, until Galen in the first century CE.
The humoral system contended that the humours -- black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood -- needed to exist in equilibrium lest they trigger illness and malaise in both body and mind.
It also meant that it is nourishing according to standard humoral physiology, the dominant system of medicine since ancient times which posited that health was a balance between four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
Galen, the ancient Greek physician, believed that the balance of the 4 humors within the body--blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm--could determine the temperament and health of an individual.
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