Read the excerpt The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England from by lan Mortimer.
Which sentence best shows the central idea of the
excerpt?
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 wellit 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.
O "Elizabethans do not understand infection and
contagion as we do."
O "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."
"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."