In ancient Greece there was an ongoing argument about what humans were made of. Hippocrates begins the famous Nature of Man (which was actually probably written by Polybus, but details) refusing to participate in the debate of which of the four elements people were made of: fire, air, water, or earth? None of these things, he points out, are “an obvious constituent of a man.” In other words, this is a stupid question.

Hippocrates/Polybus is more interested in the more scientific proposals, specifically “some . . . say that a man is blood, others that he is bile, a few that he is phlegm.”

I read this in a class on the conception of Christian bodies (which, naturally, has to start with non-Christian Greeks, because Western bias), and I couldn’t stop laughing. Someone who walked this earth seriously contemplated that people were formed “in unity” of phlegm.

I imagined a time traveler coming up to me and saying, “Excuse me, are people made of blood, phlegm, or bile?” and I, the humanities major with a high school and nonfiction essay informed idea of the human body, would have to say some version of, “Your assumptions are so wrong, I don’t even know how to answer your question.”