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Noga Arikha is a historian of ideas, and the author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours. This is the forum for her recent and archived essays, opinion pieces, reviews, journal articles, and lectures.
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Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours

A New York Times Book Review Editor`s Choice and one of the Washington Post best non-fiction books of 2007.

This is the first book ever to recount the full history in the West of the system of the four humours - blood, phlegm, choler, melancholy - fluids within the organism that, for 2500 years, were deemed to determine health and illness, mood and temperament.

The humoural system theoretically disappeared with the advent of modern medicine, but this book reveals the surprising and fascinating ways in which it has in fact survived to this day.
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Paperback now out.

Read a Q&A with the author

See the reviews

Take a humoural personality test

Watch a Talk @ Google

Listen to a program on the humours on BBC Radio 4

Listen to an interview by Lewis Lapham on Bloomberg Radio