Dictionary

humoral en · ADJ

Etymology

From Middle English humerale, humorale, humoural, from Middle French humoral and Medieval Latin hūmorālis, from Latin hūmor. By surface analysis, humor + -al.

Meanings

1. (not-comparable) Relating to the body fluids or humours.
   • Thus, the demonstration of the presence of: a thymic-lymphocytosis promoting factor in mice (Metcalf, 1958); a humoral lymphocyte stimulating factor in the serum of irradiated rats (Ito and Weinstein, 1963); a thymic lymphopoietic factor, "thymosin" (Goldstein et al., 1966); and a lymphocytosis inducing factor in the plasma of rats treated with antilymphocyte serum (Rakowitz et al., 1972) lend support to this hypothesis. Several other reports in the literature suggest the presence of humoral agents regulating leukocyte numbers. 2012, Joseph Lobue, Albert S. Gordon, Humoral Control of Growth And Differentiation, page 52:
   • The usual kind of excitation met with in the pancreas is purely humoral and there is no reason to assume that any form of nervous activity is involved in it. 2015, G. H. Parker, Humoral Agents in Nervous Activity:
   • Both the apocryphal belief in pre-transplant cross-match screening to discard active humoral immune response against the donor and the lack of sensible and reliable markers for detecting AMR give explanation to the surprising fact that AMR was nearly neglected in human renal transplantation during years. 2009, Giuseppe Remuzzi, Stefano Chiaramonte, N. Perico, Humoral Immunity in Kidney Transplantation, page 118:
2. (historical, not-comparable) Pertaining to humorism. (The theory of the influence of the humors in the production of disease.)
   • It is now well recognized that Gelenic humoral theory underpinned early modern medical practices and the maintenance of health, an antique discourse used to describe interiority and emotion: medical practitioners understood "temperament" or psychological and physiological bodily syestems according to a subject's individual balance of four essential humors—yellow bile (or choler), black bile (or melancholy), phlegm, and blood. 2021, Amy Kenny, Kaara L. Peterson, “Introduction—Everyday Humoralism”, in Amy Kenny, Kaara L. Peterson, editor, Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, page 2:
   • By predicating conception on differing humoral temperaments of men and women, medical theorists justified their own subjugation of women by cultivating a distinct female humorality responsible for behavior. 2019, Amy Kenny, Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage, page 4:
   • The planets are used as symbols in Culpeper's humoral philosophy, and the way he uses them had developed within hermetic philosophy. 2021, Stephen Taylor, The Humoral Herbal: In Good Humour, page 6:

Forms

Deriveds

humorality · humoralism · neurohumoral · nonhumoral · humoral immunity · immunohumoral · humoralist · biohumoral

Translations (1)

fi humoraalinen (relating to the body fluids)