Is wine good for your complexion? Can it change your attitude or outlook on life? Don’t be embarrassed If you haven’t asked yourself these questions. Most people haven’t — at least not recently. Once, it was a different story. Here’s how it went.
For many centuries in both East and West, medical practice and everyday ideas about what constituted good health were guided by something called humeral theory; the notion that four major fluids were at work in the body and that their balance relative to each other was responsible not only for your general condition, but the way you looked and behaved.
All four survive today mainly as words that describe personality. We still refer to people with a generally hearty, cheerful disposition as sanguine, darkly moody people as melancholic, those prone to anger as choleric and the listlessly conforming as phlegmatic. In the theory’s salad days, these weren’t just colorful terms, they were the reigning paradigm of the healing arts. The system’s popularity and amazing durability lay in its simplicity and explanatory prowess.
And it wasn’t just individuals who had a temperament (as these types were called), displayed in a specific complexion (overall appearance; eye, hair and skin color). In early and regrettable efforts at racial stereotyping, whole peoples were thought to participate in a common humeral profile, depending on the prevailing conditions in the lands they inhabited. Thus, humeral theory could account not just for variations in individuals but in entire cultures. The Dutch were generally phlegmatic, it was thought, while Brits tended toward melancholy.
Moreover, premodern medical treatment — apart from amputations, trepanning and bone-setting — consisted almost solely of maneuvers intended to reset the balance of humors, something that was accomplished primarily by diet. This meant that every known ingestible had to be investigated and categorized for its ability to tip the scales one way or the other and re-establish a healthy equipoise.
Herbalists accordingly classified every known ingestible by its tendencies to promote, counter or adjust the humors. Thus melancholy (a cold, dry humor) could be amended by applications of, say, red wine, which was considered warm, wet and tending toward the sanguine. While white wine (cold and wet) might be prescribed to offset a tendency toward the choleric (hot and dry).
Wine’s historic role in the arsenal of the premodern physician wasn’t restricted to its humeral agency. It was for centuries the medium into which medicaments and drugs of all kinds were routinely mixed and administered. If the idea of wine as medicine seems rather quaint to us moderns, let’s not forget wine’s recent (and in some quarters ongoing) fling with celebrity as a sovereign prophylactic against cardiac and vascular disease (see The New French Paradox for a recap of this).
As for the state of your correspondent’s humors, and the degree to which they may be responsible for what appears in this space from week to week, the less said the better. But his wife testifies that when a little out of sorts, and pouring himself a sip of wine with the aim of putting himself right again, he may frequently be heard to quote St. Paul’s admonition* to a young protégé: Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine oft infirmities.