On the Origin of Humoral Medicine in Latin America

For the past half‐century humoral medicine has been recognized by anthropologists to be the most important and widespread ethnomedical system in Latin America. While most scholars believe this system is largely a simplified folk variant of classical Greek and Persian humoral pathology, a small minority—particularly Audrey Butt Colson and Alfredo López Austin—argues for a New World origin. In this paper the author supports the former hypothesis by tracing the well‐documented history of classical medicine from Greece and Persia to Latin America, where it was disseminated via formal medical education, hospitals and missionary orders, home medical guides and pharmacies. The fallacies in the arguments of Colson and López Austin are also pointed out.