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Take humoral theory: In the Middle Ages, the body was thought to consist of four liquid components called humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.

“I think a toxic, black bile comes out every time you say something like that.”

The Greek physician Hippocrates believed that people’s personalities were governed by the amounts of phlegm, blood, black bile and yellow bile that flowed through their bodies.

Hellebore was prescribed in ancient Greece and the Middle Ages alike for its purgative effects, to rid the body of excess “black bile,” the imagined cause of melancholy.

The ancient Greeks, for example, believed mental disorders arose when the digestive tract produced too much black bile.