Indeed, some writers have even occasionally expressed a degree of irritation at their contemporaries’ employment of such an unnecessary term. I am sometimes left wondering why people bothered with this word at all. For instance, in 1684 readers of the English translation of Genevan physician Théophile Bonet (1620-1689)’s Mercurius Compitalitius were advised that ‘the most certain rule for the quantity is the Euphory, or well bearing, when the Stomach dispenses well with it…’ (Bonet 1684, 674). Certainly, since its first discernible emergence in the English language in the seventeenth century, euphoria (or ‘euphory’) has been so little understood it has frequently required some form of accompanying definition. Whether this has ever actually been the case is debatable. When reading documents such as these, early modern European physicians would have sometimes wondered if euphoria might not be handy as a term in itself. And it makes a great difference if the bones of the arm and of the thigh protrude to the inside for there are many and important vessels situated there… Modes of treatment and peculiarity of constitution make a great difference as to the capability of enduring such an injury. Still, euphoros – or, rather, one of its relatives – seems to have eventually captured the attention of learned European physicians, some of whom would have read the now more widely available Greek medical texts such as the Hippocratic De fracturis, in which euphoria describes patients’ abilities to recover from their injuries: English translations of the New Testament (originally in Greek) transformed the euphoreo of the rich fool’s fertile fields into variations on ‘brought forth plentifully’ – following the preference of earlier Latin translators for a wholly different phrase (in the Latin, uberes fructus ager adtulit). Indeed, at first there was apparently little use for them. Had it not been for the emergence of Neo-Latin in the early modern period, it is unlikely euphoros words would have entered most European vernacular languages. Things easy to carry or wear or manageable and light, qualities of richness and manliness, a ready tongue, an ease of ability. Ships that safely carried their cargoes could also be judged in this way. People who danced beautifully might be thought to carry the different parts of their bodies well. This ability to bear or carry well could be understood in a literal or a more abstract sense. The root euphoros and the words that came from it combined the Greek for ‘well’ and ‘bearing’ – eu (εύ) and pherein (φέρω). In Ancient Greece, to perceive the quality of euphoros ( εὔφορος) in a person or a thing was to recognise the ability of that person or that thing to bear or carry something well. What I particularly like about euphoria, however, is its breadth of meanings as well as its capacity to sometimes mean nothing very much at all – or, at least, nothing that probably does not already have a much better, more widely known name perfectly suited to it. It is also part of the history of ignorance and knowledge. This is a word that has belonged both to health and to sickness and which has emerged at times of both sadness and joy. The history of euphoria reflects a great deal about the human experience. His book ‘A History of Euphoria: The Perception and Misperception of Health and Well-Being’ was published with Routledge in January 2019. If you find any bugs in this program please report me at You need to enable JavaScript to run this Website.Dr Christopher Milnes is an early career scholar and history tutor based in London. Please support this free service by just sharing with your friends. Select the language from the dropdown given below & click on the button (Or Enter) to get the Meaning in your language. These languages include Dutch, Bulgarian, Afrikaans, Persian, Gujarati, Thai, Azerbaijani, Tamil, Malayalam, Romanian, Slovak, Maltese, Belarusian, Albanian, Basque, Filipino, Telugu, Croatian, German, Swedish, Arabic, Welsh, Hungarian, Macedonian, Lithuanian, Chinese Simplified, Hebrew, Danish, Latvian, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Chinese Traditional, Finnish, Bengali, Italian, Urdu, Icelandic, Russian, Norwegian, Estonian, Czech, Turkish, Serbian, Korean, Esperanto, Spanish, Malay, Catalan, Slovenian, Georgian, Vietnamese, Greek, Irish, Galician, Latin, French, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Hindi, Swahili, Polish, Haitian Creole, Yiddish etc. It's a free Multilanguage dictionary with many languages around the World.
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