KevinMD January 24, 2026
In my first and second KevinMD posts, I emphasized how medicine had failed clinicians by not training them in mental health care. All agree, it’s not our fault. Now let’s look at how successfully our teachers did prepare us for patients with medical disorders. There’s an interesting history behind how we developed expertise in physical diseases: Medicine needed to overthrow the four humors theory that guided clinical care from the time of Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C. until the 20th century.
The four humors theory
The four humors theory posited that an imbalance of four circulating humors (black bile, yellow bile, blood, phlegm) represented disease and caused symptoms, disability, and even death; for example, an imbalance of black bile...
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