Long before brain scans, medical writers in China and in the Greek-speaking world proposed connections between feelings and the body. Both said, in different ways, that health is a kind of balance. But their details, their words, and their histories are more different than the usual “East meets West” story suggests.
Who wrote what, and when?
China. The key book is the Huangdi neijing (Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic). It is a layered text, and its date is Disputed: Lisa Raphals says it was “probably compiled in the first century BCE” (Raphals, SEP §1.2), while Volker Scheid gives the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE (Scheid 2013). No single author wrote it.
Greece. The four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile) first appear clearly in a short medical book called The Nature of Man. Historian Jacques Jouanna notes it is the only work in the Hippocratic collection we can pin to an author: Polybus, Hippocrates’ student and son-in-law (Jouanna 2012, ch. 16, p. 335) (Strongly supported). So “Hippocrates invented the four humors” is too simple.
Earlier still, Alcmaeon of Croton (probably writing between 500 and 450 BCE) is reported to have said that health is the “equality” of many opposed powers, such as wet, dry, hot, cold, bitter, and sweet, and that disease comes when one of them rules. That’s a balance idea, but not a list of four humors (Huffman, SEP “Alcmaeon,” §3.1).
The Chinese picture: feelings move qi
Qi is a core term in Chinese medicine. Suwen chapter 5 matches each of five organs with a feeling: liver with anger, heart with joy, spleen with brooding (si), lungs with worry or sorrow (you), kidneys with fear. The same chapter ties each organ to a direction, a color, a flavor, a body tissue, and a sense opening. (Suwen 5) (Documented as the text’s teaching).
Suwen 39 adds movement. Anger makes qi rise, joy makes it slacken, sorrow makes it dissolve, fear makes it sink, and brooding ties it in knots (Suwen 39). English words for these feelings vary by translator, which is why lists online don’t always match.
Raphals describes the Neijing as linking the body, including the emotions, to the state and the cosmos through yin-yang and the five phases (wuxing) (Raphals, SEP §1.2).
The Greek picture: four fluids, four seasons
The Nature of Man says the body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, and that these are the cause of health and disease. Each humor matches a season with the same qualities: blood (hot, wet) peaks in spring, yellow bile (hot, dry) in summer, black bile (cold, dry) in autumn, and phlegm (cold, wet) in winter. Health is their good mixture; disease comes from imbalance. The account also connected daily habits with seasons (Jouanna, ch. 16, p. 335) (Documented as the text’s teaching).
Notice what’s missing. Jouanna points out that The Nature of Man doesn’t link the humors to organs, and has “not the slightest trace” of four personality types (Jouanna, ch. 12, pp. 230–231).
Galen (born 129 CE in Pergamon, died around 200) built a large theory of bodily “mixtures” of hot, cold, wet, and dry (Singer, SEP “Galen,” §§1, 6.3). He tied some feelings to the heart and blood; fear, for example, draws blood away from the skin and anger pushes it outward. He also argued that the soul’s abilities depend on the body’s mixture, though scholars disagree on how far he meant it (Singer, §7.2) (Disputed).
Where did “sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic” come from?
Not from Hippocrates, and not really from Galen. Jouanna shows Galen helped the four humors spread by crediting them to Hippocrates, but “he does not present an elaborated theory of the four temperaments.” That fuller theory shows up in later Greek and Latin texts. The first certain date is the English monk Bede, who laid it out in 725 CE (Jouanna, ch. 12, pp. 247–249) (Strongly supported; the exact origin is Unknown).
At least one current open psychology textbook still says Hippocrates or Galen created the four temperaments (Baylor open textbook, “Personality”). Jouanna’s work says otherwise.
Did the two traditions meet?
No source cited here tested whether the two traditions had early contact, so that is Unknown. What is Documented is that Greek medicine traveled widely later: Ibn Sina (Avicenna, born around 970, died 1037) combined Greek learning with early Islamic thought, and wrote the Canon of Medicine. In Latin translation, the Canon was a basis of university medical teaching in Europe until the 17th century (Gutas, SEP “Ibn Sina”).
Some writers say Chinese balance was “flowing” and Greek balance was “static.” We couldn’t source that contrast, so this page doesn’t claim it. Both texts talk about change: qi moves, and humors rise and fall with the seasons.
An analogy, not evidence: two maps using different symbols. The comparison does not establish whether their makers met.
Were these ideas true?
These are historical theories, presented as the authors’ explanations rather than established accounts of how bodies work. Modern neuroscience studies the nervous system, including the brain’s role in thoughts and emotions (MedlinePlus). A resemblance between an old idea and a modern term is not enough to confirm the old explanation.
“Traditional Chinese Medicine” is also a modern label. Scheid shows it names a textbook version set up in China from 1959 on (Scheid 2007). So it isn’t a time capsule of the Neijing.
How we know
What survives. Copied and edited texts, passed down and interpreted by later readers. The Nature of Man comes to us in manuscripts and modern editions (Jouanna).
Whose voices are missing. The selected passages emphasize writers’ explanations. They do not let us reconstruct how every person described in those texts understood their own feelings.
How later readers used it. Textbooks often pin the four temperaments on Hippocrates and Galen. That’s a later retelling.
Then vs. now
Then: Chinese classics tied five feelings to five organs and to the movement of qi. Greek writers tied four humors to the seasons; the four personality types came centuries later.
Now: Neuroscience studies the brain and nervous system. This historical comparison does not establish the old systems as accurate biological models.