and restore balance. Water corresponded to phlegm and a phlegmatic temperament. Phlegm had a cold and damp nature, epitomised by the season of winter, and gave rise to illnesses such as catarrh, respiratory infections, weight gain and fluid retention. Warming and drying herbs such as thyme, hyssop and ginger were used to clear cold and damp symptoms, and thereby restore the balance of the humours. Fire corresponded to choler, or yellow bile, related to summer. A choleric type would be hot tempered and prone to liver and digestive problems. Cooling and moistening herbs such as dandelion, violets and lettuce would help to balance the excess heat and dryness of the choleric temperament. Air corresponded to blood and the sanguine temperament, epitomised by spring. A sanguine type would be easy going and good humoured, but prone to excesses and over-indulgence, giving rise to problems such as gout and diarrhoea. Cool dry herbs such as burdock or figwort were used to balance the humours.
Thyme is a warming herb and was therefore used to clear cold and damp symptoms and restore the balance of the humours in the body.
Great Greek Herbals
Another famous Greek physician was Theophrastus (372-286 BC), a friend and pupil of Aristotle, who inherited Aristotle's garden and library and wrote the first important herbal, Enquiry into Plants, which has survived until today. He listed 500 healing plants, and the properties of oils and spices, basing much of his work on Aristotle's botanical writings that expanded much of Hippocrates' work. Another great source of herbal knowledge derives from the Alexandrian school, which enabled Greek medicine to flourish – it drew on Greek herbal knowledge as well as Egyptian, Sumerian and Assyrian healing traditions, and included knowledge brought back from campaigns in Asia. The strong traditions developed here survived into medieval Europe through the writers and scholars of the Arab world.
Taraxacum officinale, or dandelion, was believed to balance the excess heat and dryness of the choleric temperament.
Galen (131-200 AD), another notable Greek physician, studied at the Alexandrian school and later became renowned as surgeon to the gladiators in Rome, and personal physician to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD). In his herbal De Simplicibus he expanded on Hippocrates' philosophy and classification of herbs into the four humours. His works became the standard medical text of Rome and later of the Arab physicians and medieval monks. His theories are still clearly to be found in Unani Tibb medicine today (pages 20-23).
Pedanius Dioscorides was a Greek physician serving with the Roman army during the reign of Emperor Nero, which allowed him to travel extensively in Asia Minor. Around 60 AD he set himself the enormous task of collating all the current knowledge on medicinal plants and healing substances in one work, De Materia Medica. It included discussion of the components of perfumes and their medicinal properties, and the aromatic herbs used for these included balm, basil, coriander, fennel, garlic, hyssop, marjoram, mint, myrtle, rosemary and violet. His famous herbal provided the major source of herbal knowledge for all the herbals that followed for the next 1500 years and has been copied and quoted to the present day.
Continuing Legacy
Under the Romans the Catholic papacy grew more powerful, and the early Christians, feeling that the church, rather than physicians, should be responsible for health of mind and soul, started to repress the use of many “pagan” herbs. In 529 AD Pope Gregory the Great ruled that learning that was not in accordance with the political ambitions of the papacy should be forbidden. Thus, during the Dark Ages (around 200-800 AD) knowledge of herbs and the use of the great herbals was pushed underground and scientific research and writing in Europe came to a halt.
Steiner's theory of temperaments divides personalities into four types, and explains how each type relates to the others, and the world.
However, the highly sophisticated Arab culture of the time maintained and developed the healing legacy of the Greeks, merging it with their ancient folk medicine and surviving Egyptian traditions. By 900 AD, all Greek herbal and botanical texts that had survived were translated into Arabic in the cultural centres of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. When Arab armies invaded North Africa and Spain they took with them their knowledge of healing plants and medicine. In Spain, particularly in Cordoba, schools of medicine were established that kept alive the Greek and Arabic medical traditions in the medieval period, spreading the teachings throughout Europe. Indeed, as late as the 18th century, the standard textbook in use in medieval schools across Europe, Avicenna's Canon Medicinae or The Canon of Medicine, was a fusion of ancient Greek, Arabic and Indian systems of medicine and herbal healing.
The knowledge of humoral medicine preserved by the Arabic schools can be seen in some of today's practice of herbal medicine. Rudolf Steiner, for example, derived many of his ideas of anthroposophical medicine from Graeco-Arabic thought. His four temperaments are related to the dominance of one or more of the four levels of self. Choleric with the ego (which Steiner associates with warmth and “fire”), sanguine with the astral body, phlegmatic with the etheric body, and melancholic with the physical body. The personality types described by Hans Eysenck (basically extrovert and introvert) are also divided into four different types resembling the influence of the humours. Introverted types tend to be melancholic and phlegmatic, while extroverts tend to be choleric and sanguine.
Unani Tibb
Between the 9th and 13th centuries, Graeco-Roman medicine from Hippocrates and Galen was assimilated by the Arabs, and an Arabic tradition of medicine, known as Unani Tibb, developed. The word Unani (meaning “Ionian”) reflects the strong Greek influence to this tradition, while Tibb means the knowledge of the states of the human body in health and disease.
A succession of renowned Arab physicians including Albucasis, Razis and Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna) were particularly responsible for the development of medicine at this time, adding their own inventions and discoveries to the sum of herbal and botanical knowledge. Avicenna (980-1037 AD) brought together all that was available on the nature of disease, plant medicines, aromatics and medical theories, including the teachings of Sushruta and Charaka from the Ayurvedic tradition, in his Canon Medicinae. It was Avicenna who developed the process of distillation originated in the Alexandrian school around the 3rd century. He invented the apparatus and method of alembic distillation to extract essential oils from aromatic plants – a great landmark in the history of aromatherapy. Fragrant oils were particularly used for their purifying and restorative properties at this time and were thought to reduce the impact of destructive emotions such as grief and fear on the health of the body.
Practice in India and Beyond
When the Mongols invaded Persia and Central Asia, many scholars and physicians of Unani fled to India. Once established in India, Unani Tibb then suffered setbacks under British rule, although it still flourished unofficially. In the ensuing struggle against British colonialism a friend of Mahatma Gandhi, Muhammad Ajmal Khan, founded the Unani Tibb and Ayurvedic College in Delhi in 1916, a landmark in its survival. Today Unani is practiced in Iran, Pakistan, China, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and other parts of the Middle East. In India there are now many Unani medical colleges where, after a five and half year course, graduates are awarded a BUMS (Bachelor of Unani Medicine and Surgery) degree and can practice as government approved doctors. There are about 10 Unani medical colleges
