The University of South Carolina School of Medicine Library is proud to host a nationally traveling exhibit entitled "And There's the Humor of It: Shakespeare and the Four Humors." The six banner exhibit is on loan to the library from the National Library of Medicine from July 25 through September 3, 2016, and is currently on display in the library near the circulation desk.
From the exhibit's website: "William Shakespeare (1564–1616) created characters that are among the richest and most humanly recognizable in all of literature. Yet Shakespeare understood human personality in the terms available to his age—that of the now-discarded theory of the four bodily humors—blood, bile, melancholy, and phlegm. These four humors were thought to define peoples’ physical and mental health, and determined their personalities, as well. "And there’s the humor of it" Shakespeare and the four humorsexplores the language of the four humors that bred the core passions of anger, grief, hope, and fear—the emotions conveyed so powerfully in Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies."
Read more about the exhibit at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/shakespeare/introduction.html.
