Lesson 12
Hippocrates believed that the body had four main fluids or humors. They are blood (which is warm and wet), yellow bile (which is warm and dry), black bile (which is cold and dry) and phlegm (which is cold and wet). If these were out of balance, you would get sick in some way in body or mind. For example, if you had too much blood, you might have a bad temper or be angry a lot. If you had too much bile, you might not be able to sleep. If you had too much phlegm you’d be calm and unemotional. And if you had too much black bile, you might be sad all that time. Hippocrates thought be doing things to change the levels of these fluids, you could get better. We know today that these ideas are wrong, but they were a good start to understanding that our body is made up of a lot of fluids. This lesson explains how veins pump blood to the heart to get oxygen, and arteries pump blood away from the heart to deliver that oxygen to the parts of the body.
Lesson 13: Plato lived 30 years after Hippocrates and Democritus. He is said to have written down the conversations that another Greek man (Socrates) had with people. Socrates was very inquisitive and liked to learn by asking questions. Plato had interesting thoughts about math and what is real. He didn’t think that the world we see, touch, and feel, is the real world, he thought there was a higher or more pure world above it that we can’t sense. This is confusing, and it doesn’t fit with how we do science today, which is all based on using our senses to tell what is true. But Plato’s ideas about an abstract world is sort of true when it comes to math. Math is true even outside of the senses, and it was true and is true before people discovered it. There are truths in math that are true whether or not we have discovered them. Plato began the first great academy which attracted the smartest people of that time. One of them was Aristotle!
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