l doctrines stemming largely from Hippocrates were
made elaborate by Galen but were founded upon ideas even more ancient
than either thinker and practitioner. As understood by the
seventeenth-century man of medicine, the basic ideas of the humoral
theory were the four elements, the four qualities, and the four humors.
The elements were fire, air, earth, and water; the four qualities were
hot, cold, moist, and dry; and the four humors were phlegm, black bile,
yellow bile, and blood. From these ideological building stones a highly
complex system of pathology developed; from it an involved system of
treatment originated. In essence the practitioner of the humoral school
attempted to restore the naturally harmonious balance of elements,
qualities, and humors that had broken down and caused disease or pain.

The seventeenth-century, however, witnessed in medicine the trend,
manifest then in so many fields of thought, away from an uncritical
acceptance of the authority of the past. It also saw a defiant denial
of ancient authority among those more radically inclined, such as the
disciples of the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician, Paracelsus.
Although some of his practices and teachings were based on the
supernatural, Paracelsus stressed observation and the avoidance of a
mere system of book-learning.

Practice lagged behind new scientific theory in medicine but Virginia
must have felt at least the reverberations caused by the clash of the
ancient and the new.

An important new school of medical theory was the iatrophysical or
iatromathematical (_iatros_ from the Greek--physician). This medical
theory--as is the case with many scientific theories-was borrowed from
another branch of science. The seventeenth century, the age of Isaac
Newton, Galileo Galilei, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, Rene
Descartes, and other giants of physical science, was a period of
remarkable progress in the field of physics. It is not surprising then
that theorists in the field of medicine, noting the truths discovered
by conceiving of nature as a great machine functioning according to
laws that could be expressed in mathematical terms, should have
attempted to explain the human body as a machine.

William Harvey (1578-1657), whose name looms great in the history of
seventeenth-century medicine, explained the circulation of the blood in
mechanical terminology. To Harvey, working under the influence of the
great physicists, the heart was a