The Temperamental Nude: Class, Medicine and Representation in Eighteenth-Century France

by Tony Halliday

Although discredited by seventeenth-century scientists, temperament theory - which attributed human moods to the interaction of four distinct bodily fluids or 'humours' - was refashioned a century later to create a moral and physiological typology of social classes. This revival was the work of leading physiologists of the time, but the impact of their thinking extended far beyond medicine to embrace the history of ideas and, in particular, the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0729409945
• ISBN13: 9780729409940
• Release Date: May 2010
• Publisher: Voltaire Foundation
• Length: 319 Pages