Commentary on Human Temperaments as They Depend on the Structure and Fabric of the Body

greater or lesser mobility of the parts between which it lies, in the same way as one must look to the common integuments, whose denser or looser fabric is able to change external stimuli in different ways.

d) The elements, quantity, and mixture of the humors of the body.

Although I am far from admitting the humors as the proximate cause of diverse temperament, and although I have contended that this should be sought better in the solids endowed with vital force, it cannot be denied that the humors can contribute something to determining that proximate cause. A human, from the first moment he begins to exist until birth, constitutes a part of the mother, and takes both nourishment and growth from her humors, whether brought through the immediate anastomosis of the vessels of the mother and fetus, or through the resorption of the vessels of the umbilical cord from the placenta; it is therefore understood that morbific matter lurking in the mass of the mother's humors can enter p; the little heart and other parts of the small body do not obtain the stimulus of healthy blood that is agreeable to nature, but are excited rather by a certain preternatural stimulus; and since irritability is increased by continuous and gentle irritation q, this most tender creature will greet the first day of life endowed with that irritable constitution which, therefore, undoubtedly provides a most efficacious cause for such diversity in the animal economy, as well as for many calamities throughout the whole of life. However, it is otherwise when the life-fluid runs through the healthy vessels of the fetus; for then the solids resist stimuli which could destroy a more irritable machine. Although it very often takes a concurrence of many causes to prepare that more irritable and sensitive nature, it seems, however, from what has just been said, what kind of constitution becomes predominant in our age, which favors the Muses, Bacchus, and Venus.

e) Perhaps a greater or lesser abundance of a certain electric r, magnetic, or other kind of principle common in animals as well as other bodies.

When we consider the anxiety, extreme exhaustion, and other unpleasant sensations of certain men which precede stormy weather, and the sudden relief of body and mind after the storm; when it is certain that electricity applied by physicians has benefited some so-called nervous patients s but has harmed others t, it does not seem difficult to believe that the electric principle, whether increased or diminished in the air, has a greater influence upon sensibility and irritability than is commonly believed.

p) Frank, System of a Complete Medical Police, Mannheim 1779, Vol. I, p. 303 ff.
q) Cl. C. L. Hoffmann, On the Sensibility and Irritability of Parts, Münster 1779, p. 164.
r) Illustrious Wrisberg, a man well-deserving of the doctrine of temperaments, in additions to Haller’s First Lines of Physiology, p. 77, 152, 54, 210.
s) Illustrious Lichtenberg in notes to Erxleben’s Fundamentals of Natural Philosophy, Göttingen 1787, p. 455. Cl. de Haen, Rational Medicine, Vol. I, Part 1, ch. 8.
t) Cl. Weikard, Miscellaneous Medical Writings, Vol. I, p. 143. Cl. Pickel, Dissertation on Electricity and Animal Heat, Würzburg 1778, p. 119.