the author’s purposethe author’s point of viewhow central ideas connecthow to summarize the text
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.The theory of the humors is just the basic framework into which physicians fit a number of other ideas. Galen teaches that every living thing is composed of the four elements: fire, earth, air, and water. Each of these corresponds with one of the four humors. Fire, which is said to be hot and dry, corresponds with choler; water (cold and wet) with phlegm; earth (dry and cold) with black bile; and air (hot and wet) with blood. These properties are all associated with parts of the body, so the brain is cold and moist, the kidneys hot and moist, and so on. If an imbalance in the humors clashes with the properties of an organ, the patient will be ill.
Read the passage.If you ever visit Denver, Colorado, you should allow yourself several hours to peruse the Denver Art Museum’s Asian art collection. This world-renowned collection houses an impressive array of artwork, including woodblock prints, tea ceremony articles, bamboo sculptures, and much more. One piece of particular interest is a 17th-century ink-on-silk drawing of Daruma, a South Indian monk. Visitors can also view Japanese ceramics and paintings by women artists from the 17th–19th centuries—the largest such collection outside of Japan. The Denver Art Museum is one of the larger US art museums, with its global collections containing more than 70,000 works of art from around the world.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.Elizabethan people suffer from some afflictions that no longer exist in modern England. Plague is the obvious example but it is by no means the only one. Sweating sickness kills tens of thousands of people on its first appearance in 1485 and periodically thereafter. It is a terrifying disease because sufferers die within hours. It doesn’t return after a particularly bad outbreak in 1556 but people do not know whether it has gone for good; they still fear it, and it continues to be part of the medical landscape for many years.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.Serious though influenza and malaria are, they are not the biggest killers of the age. That title belongs to the plague or "pestilence.” No one knows precisely how many die over the course of the reign but the total is probably around 250,000. In 1565 the people of Bristol count up the plague victims for that year and arrive at the figure of 2,070, almost 20 percent of the population. Ten years later, after another deadly outbreak, they record a further 2,000 fatalities.
Which sentence is an example of an objective summary?
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer.How do these humors get out of balance? This is where the overlapping ideas of Elizabethan medicine might leave you a little confused. By far the most important cause is divine intervention. People believe that illnesses may be sent to punish them for a sin—or simply because God wants them to die and go to Heaven. Some hold that God, by sending them an illness, is giving them a chance to atone for some previous transgression through suffering, and so they are thankful for their affliction. Other causes of illness are old age, excitement, or contagion through close proximity to other ill people and decaying matter. Filthy areas such as stagnant pools and dead bodies create a miasma around them, and if the air or water of a miasma enters the body, it disrupts the humors.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.The grim reality is that plague in the capital is as common as the stench of the cesspits and almost as unavoidable. You cannot predict where it will strike: People living next door to infected houses are left unaffected. Some people are not touched even when others in their own house have it.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.But what if it comes to the worst? What if you have painful black buboes in your groin and armpits, and experience the rapid pulse, the headaches, the terrific thirst, and delirium that are the tokens of the plague? There is little you can do. Physicians will prescribe the traditional medicines of dragon water, mithridatium, and theriac if they hear you are suffering but you will suspect that these are cynical attempts to relieve a dying person of his money. The physicians themselves will not normally come near you. Simon Forman, who does attend plague sufferers, is a rare exception: this is because he has himself survived the disease and believes he cannot catch it again.
Read the excerpt The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England from by Ian Mortimer.Elizabethans do not understand infection and contagion as we do. It is not that they are completely ignorant as to how illnesses spread—physicians believe they know perfectly well—it is rather that their understanding is very different from ours. The principal ideas underpinning most Elizabethan medical thinking come from Galen, who lived in the second century A.D. Physicians will cite him as an unquestionable authority when they explain to you that your health depends on a balance of the four humors: yellow bile or choler, black bile, phlegm, and blood. If there is too much choler in your body, you will grow choleric; too much blood and you will be sanguine; too much phlegm and you will be phlegmatic; and too much black bile makes you melancholic. It is from these imbalances that sickness arises.
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