Phlegmatic

Phlegm is the humour of this temperament, cold and moist, and therefore paired with water among the elements, with winter among the seasons, and with old age among the ages of life. Its traditional seat is the brain, and the visible evidence for it was the mucus of colds and catarrhs, which increases in winter and which the scheme took as the humour made apparent.

The word has an odd history. The Greek phlegma comes from a root meaning to burn and originally denoted inflammation, which is the opposite of what it came to mean; the humoral system fixed it as the cold wet humour and the older sense fell away. That reversal is a useful reminder that the four names were not coined for the system. They were drawn from existing medical vocabulary and then given fixed places in a structure that vocabulary had not been built to serve, which is exactly what happened to the angelic ranks in a quite different field.

In treatment, phlegm called for heating and drying: warm and pungent preparations, exercise, and the avoidance of cold damp air and cold damp food. Because the humour was held to accumulate with age and with winter, an old person in a cold country was understood to be fighting a standing excess, and a great deal of the regimen literature is addressed to precisely that situation.

Phlegmatic is the one of the four English words whose sense has hardly shifted. It still means unexcitable, hard to provoke and slow to react, and it still carries a slight edge: to call someone phlegmatic is not quite praise. The older writers were blunter about it. The phlegmatic complexion was described as heavy, pale, soft fleshed, sleepy, dull of apprehension and unwilling to move, and where the sanguine person was too changeable and the choleric too quick, the phlegmatic person was held to be too little of anything.

Astrological medicine assigned the complexion to the Moon, cold and moist in the traditional scheme and associated with everything fluid, changeable and receptive. That assignment softened the portrait somewhat, since the Moon carries associations of sympathy and of imagination that plain sluggishness does not.

Later writers who took the four temperaments as a psychology rather than a physiology have generally rehabilitated it, reading phlegmatic as steady, patient, reliable and difficult to panic, which is much closer to how the word is used in ordinary English now. The rehabilitation is a real change of content and not only a change of tone. A scheme that ranked complexions by how well they served health has been converted into one that treats four types as equally valid, and only the second version can treat being hard to stir as a strength.