Bradstreet's Four Humours as 17th Century Science

Anne Bradstreet's early poems, the original Quaternions on the Elements, the Humours, the Ages of Man, and the Seasons, are examples of 17th century concepts of man, nature, and physical science. Specifically, the "Four Humours" poem relates to paradigms of knowledge based on late medieval/renaissance anatomy and physiology. That these values find themselves worked into poetic material is a further example of how the transatlanticist community kept and disseminated information. Moreover, the "Humours," as well as its sister poems, were likely used as educational texts in a dame school that Anne Bradstreet might have run in her home, in compliance with the 1642 mandate by the Court of Assistants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for parents to teach their children to read.

"I had eight bird hatched in one nest"

Stained glass window at St. Boltoph's Church,

Boston , Lincolnshire, England

The Quaternions, again dealing with what was then considered natural science and philosophy, were first circulated in manuscript form, also in 1642, and were dedicated to Bradstreet's father, the deputy governor Thomas Dudley. They then found themselves as the banner piece in the 1650 London publication of the Tenth Muse, and again in the 1678 Boston publication of Several Poems. While Bradstreet (1612-1672) certainly did not read Newton, she surely read Dr. Helkiah Crooke's work (1615) on anatomy based on Vesalius' 16th century treatise and illustrations on the human body. I am interested in the connection between Bradstreet's treatment of natural sciences by way of "The Four Humors" strict, formal, prosody requirements, which are in themselves emblematic of the orderly way 17th century sensibilities perceived the universe as constructed. The world was made of four elements, which corresponded to four humours of the body, which were echoed in four ages of man (childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age), and finally in the four seasons. Treating science in a series of tightly constructed stichic poems was entirely appropriate, and pedagogically sound, to the early 17 th century Puritan mind.

frontispiece of 1678 Several Poems
frontispiece of 1650 Tenth Muse

First, let's take a close look at the personae of the Humours which Bradstreet develops in this, the second quaternion, "The Four Humours of Man's Constitution." The Humours are four sisters, and speak as such, in a colloquy or four-way dialogue style which allows each sister a say in her role, or place of prominence, in man's "constitution" or health. The sisters are: Choler, Blood, Melancholy, and Phlegm. Choler is the eldest daughter of the element Fire, (the subject of the first or previous quaternion is the four elements). Blood is the daughter of Air; Melancholy (or Black Bile) is the daughter of Earth; and Phlegm (or Yellow/White Bile) is the daughter of Water. Bradstreet sets up and reinforces these maternal relationships strongly and clearly at the outset of the poems, as yet another level of their natural sciences pedigree. Much has been made that these personifications use female voices, and not male; however, while female in name, they are not feminine in vocality. See the below chart for further clarification of the identities and physical features of the Humours:

Choler, Blood, Melancholy, and Phlegm debate their various strengths, as it was also understood that this tension, and subsequent imbalance, were what caused physical ailments, and mental disorders, within the body. For instance, in this poem, Choler speaks first and goes on the attack against Blood, who rebuts Choler's aggression, while defending herself as a benign, balancing force:

But I [Blood] with thy [Choler's] help, can give a growth

As plants, trees, and small embryon know'th

And if vital spirits do flow from thee [Choler],

I am as sure, the natural, from me [Blood]; [. . . /] (Hensley 40)

Blood continues, almost in the voice of the poet herself, while alluding to the medical work of Helkiah Crooke:

To play philosopher I have no list,

Nor yet physician, nor anatomist, [ . . . /]

Through warm blue conduits of my venial rills [ . . . /]

Their wondrous mixture is of blood and air

The first myself, second my mother fair. (Hensley 39, 42)

Then Blood also stakes out her territory as different from Choler's martial vocation based on innate rage:

I might here show the nobleness of mind

Of such as to the sanguine are inclined,

They're liberal, pleasant, kind and courteous, [. . . /]

For arts and sciences they are the fittest. (Hensley 42)

Blood finishes her section by setting up the final soliloquies of Melancholy and Phelgm, whose influences Blood in turn attacks, but not as ferociously as was Choler's attack of her. Blood says, "So Melancholy seizes on a man,/[. . .] And Phlegm likewise can show her cruel art"(42).

Melancholy calls herself "the melancholy snake," and directly relates herself to her mother, Earth, and to her prevailing organ, the spleen:

Then who's man's friend, when life and all forsakes?

His mother, mine, him to her womb retakes:

Thus he is ours, his portion is the grave, [ . . . /]

Likewise the useful spleen, though not the best,

Yet is a bowel called well as the rest:

The liver, the stomach, owe their thanks of right

The first drains, of th' last quicks appetite. (Hensley 45)

She then takes on the other Humours and other anatomical parts, by answering their criticism: "The spleen for all you three was made a sink. . . I am black 'tis true;/But that which shows how high your spite is bent/Is charging me to be thy excrement/ . . . Show them thy passage to th' duodenum " (45). One must admire Bradstreet's rhyming skill here, and further imagine that the "bent/excrement" couplet was surely a favorite to learn. Melancholy, like her two sisters who have already paired in debate, ("Choler's too rash" and "Sanguine is more fickle"), then turns to Phlegm: "And What Phlegm is, we know, like to her mother [Water],/Unstable is the one, and so the other" (46).

Phlegm concludes the rhetorical exchange between the combative sisters by admitting to Melancholy's claim that she is "unstable"; but Phlegm sees herself favorably as having "polished skin," an "ivory face," and a "lily white" visage like that of "beauteous Helena" (48-49). More importantly, Phlegm's body part, the brain, governs all the others:

The brain's the noblest member will allow,

Its form and situation will avow,

Its ventricles, membranes and wondrous net

Galen, Hippocrates drive to a set. (Hensley 48)

The brain also houses the five senses, including the sense of sight, of which Bradstreet, revealing further her science knowledge, says: "The optic nerve, coats, humours all are mine,/The wat'ry, glassy, and the crystalline" (49). The brain also connects to the spine, or the "marrow of the back" and to other "nerves" and "[voluntary] ligaments" (49). Most importantly, in this last verse in the humors' Quaternion, Bradstreet mentions Dr. Helkiah Crooke directly, when she says of other internal organs, "Some learned Crooke may these reveal/But modesty hath charged me to conceal" (49).

List, or readiness, or capability

Rills are small streams or rivulets.

She also says of the eyes, "He was no fool who thought the soul lay there," an allusion to Du Bartas.

Crooke's book Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man, together with the controversies and figures thereto belonging (1615), was essentially an apocryphal medical school text, dedicated to "Barbers, Chirurgeons, Masters, Wardens, Assistants and Communal[i]ty of Same." Crooke called himself a "Doctor in Physick" who "intended the Anatomy to be but an entrance into a worke of Chirurgery," as "the Body of Man is the subject of your Art, without the knowledge whereof it is impossible for a Chirurgeon to work with any confidence or certainty of success" (ii). Crooke, as a physician, saw himself above a mere surgeon, who "should content himself with the limits of his profession and not usurpe on the profession of the Physician; . . . [however], I do not deny but that a Chirurgeon, if he lay good foundations and build thereafter upon them and may be a Physician as well" (iv). Surgeons were barbers, cutters, blood-letters; whereas physicians were philosophers of science, who understood not just anatomy, but also the "Constitution of a man's body" due to a "Mixture of the principles [or Humours] whereof he consisteth; [and] of the Temperament of each part arising out of that mixture" (ii). Crooke concludes, "So that in our Art, he that knows what should bee the naturall disposition of every part will be left able to judge when Nature declineth from that integrity; . . . This part is indeed Philosophicall" (iii).

The concept of humors governing certain body-areas was not, however, an entirely metaphysical or "philosophical" belief. Indeed Crooke's Mikrokosmographia is a huge work, that is packed with not so quaint, and in some ways explicit anatomical information, and illustrations. For instance, in the Fifth Book, Crooke introduces a section on gynecology with a series of "controversies" or questions, including: "Of the temperament of women, whether they are colder or hotter than men; What seed is; . . . Whether women yield seed; . . . Whence cometh the pleasure of the ejaculation of seed; Whether the menstruall bloud have any noxious of hurtfull quality therein [and/or] bee the cause of meazles and smallpox; . . .Whether it be necessary to conception that the seed of both sexes should issue together and that with pleasure, be perfectly mingled; Whether the womb have any operative or active power in the conformation of the Creature; . . . Of monsters and Hermaphrodites; . . . [and] Whether in a desperate birth the Caesarean Section be so attempted" (250). He contextualizes the humors-concept by placing it in its classical origins, as in Chapter 1: "A Division of the Body of Man":

Diocles Carisius , in an Epistle to King Antigonus, divides the body of Man

into the head, the chest, the belly, and the bladder. The Egyptians into the head,

the neck, the chest, the hands, and the legs. . . . Hippocrates in his Aphorisms

called [the second region] the upper belly, . . . the third region is called the

lower belly, [and contains] the hip bones, the haunch bones, and the share bones:

behind by five rack bones of the loins, and the holy organ or great bone ; and

before by the whole Abdomen or paunch. (Crooke 49)

Hence, Bradstreet lived in an era which regarded anatomical knowledge as merely the base foundation of a higher knowledge of what were then the mysteries of the human body. The dialogue between the Humours, then, departs from simple anatomy into the poetic and the logical, which was a way to explain the different "temperaments" of man, his various diseases, and what might be typical symptoms for those personalities or ailments.

taxonomy for which is listed by Crooke in English, Latin, and Greek.

Or "querelles femmes"

The penis?