How to Use black bile in a Sentence

black bile

noun
Definition of black bilenext
  • Four humors, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood, make up the human body.
    — Maude Campbell, Popular Mechanics, 11 Nov. 2020
  • Between the 2nd and the 18th centuries, medicine defined health depending on four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
    — Fay Bound Alberti, Quartz, 25 Nov. 2019
  • An excess of yellow bile, for instance, caused rheumatism; too much black bile caused cancer.
    — Jack Feerick, Discover Magazine, 16 Dec. 2020
  • Illness was thought to be caused either by a blockage of a flow within the body or by an imbalance of the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm).
    — Olivia Campbell, Smithsonian Magazine, 1 Mar. 2021
  • If there wasn’t enough blood in your mix, for instance, enemas would be prescribed to draw out black bile, along with vomiting to bring up yellow bile.
    — Jack Feerick, Discover Magazine, 16 Dec. 2020
  • Parents were so revolted and disturbed by the fast-food chain’s promotion of a film in which the bad guy bites off a handler’s nose and spits up black bile that the next movie stuck to promotional cups, rather than kids’ toys.
    — Jesse Hassenger, Vulture, 8 Mar. 2022
  • Blood, for instance, was identified with air, with warm and moist qualities, while black bile was associated with earth, cold and dry.
    — Jack Feerick, Discover Magazine, 16 Dec. 2020
  • Writers including Hippocrates and Galen believed the human body was composed of four humors, or fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile.
    — Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian, 17 May 2017
  • Roberta Bivins points out in her history of alternative medicine that for most of Western history, medical wisdom held that physical health relied on the balance of the four humors (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm).
    — Jordan Kisner, The Atlantic, 7 Mar. 2020
  • Galen, the Greco-Roman physician of the second century, argued that all human pathology could be conceptualized as imbalances of humors—black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm.
    — Siddhartha Mukherjee, The New Yorker, 15 July 2019
  • Partly based on the Greek philosophy of four humors — black bile, phlegm, yellow bile and blood — as the basis of emotions, temperament and health, bloodletting was believed to remedy disease caused by imbalanced humors.
    — Kristen Rogers, CNN, 17 Oct. 2020
  • After all, black bile, it was believed, caused not only sadness, but also lovesickness, irrational behaviour, and uncontrolled physical impulses.
    — Mina Seçkin, refinery29.com, 17 Nov. 2021
  • The topic is Hippocrates’ psychological prototypes — melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric — based on ancient beliefs in four corresponding humors: black bile, blood, phlegm and yellow bile.
    — Lauren Warnecke, chicagotribune.com, 8 Feb. 2018
  • Seventeenth-century medical practitioner John Stockton wrote a manuscript suggesting that different intestinal worms were created by imbalances in the body’s four humors; blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile.
    — Brian Handwerk, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 Aug. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'black bile.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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