Here is an illustration of a human’s digestive system, as imagined by one Guido de Vigevano in 1345 CE. There’s a lot he got right here — esophagus, diaphragm, stomach, intestines, and sphincter. But there’s obviously also a lot of missing details, and so it’s not surprising that 14th-century ideas about digestion were similarly faulty.
Essentially, Medieval people viewed digestion as continuing the process of cooking that began outside the body. As a 12/13th-century work known as the “Regimen sanitation Salernitanum/Lilium medicinae,” documents, the physiology of the digestive system wss based off of the Ancient Greek humoral theory, which posited that the body was made up of combinations of four fluids and could be characterized in terms of hot, cold, wet, and dry. You needed to balance what you ate in terms of these properties. Thus, you wanted to start out your meal with easily digested foods, lest your heavy foods would sink to the bottom of the stomach and draw in bad humors. And you didn’t want bad humors — that would lead to the food blocking the digestive tract and causing putrefaction in the body.
And gross etymology factoid: our word “colon” is related to the word “colander”, and Medieval people thought of the colon as sort of colander, having the job of straining the feces.
Source(s): Image is Guido de Vigevano, 1345 CE. From the Anathomia Philippi Septimi. Chantilly, Musee Conde MS 334. “5 ridiculous beliefs about indigestion and stomach aches from history, just in time for Thanksgiving, JR Thorpe, Nov 23 2016, _Bustle_. Stanford web.stanford.edi/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/stomachpages/stomachcolonintestines.html. “History of the stomach and intestines.” Wikipedia, “medieval cuisine.”
