...Wen Qing immediately forgets that she's supposed to not be giving away valuable traditional Chinese medicine tutoring for free in her excitement about contrasting Avicenna's medical worldview with the medical worldviews she's more familiar with.

- okay, great.

Naima can pull out a notebook and take her usual shorthand-style notes on what the excited girl says, and also occasionally comment that this or that reminds her of Galen or Hippocrates.

Isn't.... all of that stuff not true, thinks a very unhappy senior who has not thought about medicine since mundie middle school, where it definitely talked about bacteria and viruses and stuff not humours, and his parents never said "oh yeah actually the ancient Greeks were right". He does not ask this question. It doesn't really matter. 

Unfortunately for Naima, Wen Qing has questions about how exactly it reminds her of Galen.

Shit. "Okay, uh, Galen's theory of medicine is I think the one that introduced the four humors, which are - blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm." Please don't ask what liquids these ideas actually correspond to. "The idea was that a small imbalance in them caused personality traits, like, uh, blood is associated with being enthusiastic and hot-tempered, but a larger imbalance causes various illnesses, like - uh, I don't remember what too much blood does, but I think too much black bile causes acute depression, that sort of thing. It sounds like Avicenna is keeping that - that'll be Greek influence, not him thinking it up again on his own, I think - but combining that with this idea of the traditional four elements of earth, air, water, and fire, and the idea that some sicknesses are also caused by imbalances between these elements, which are held to make up all substances, including the human body."

"Hm. The traditional Chinese medicine has xue and jinye-- uh, the blood and the fluids-- but it doesn't distinguish different kinds of jinye. It seems like the humors correspond to the elements, which also play an important role in the traditional Chinese medicine, but we have the metal and the wood instead of the air. I wonder what happens if you try to correspond ji-- the bodily fluids to the Chinese elements."

"Chinese medicine has five?"

"Yes. The fire, the earth, the water, the wood, the metal."

She writes that down. "Okay. Uh, I think that Avicenna is looking at - contrasts, here, between the different elements? Which ones are hot and which ones are cold, which ones are wet and which ones are dry, stuff like that. So I guess you could also try to sort the Chinese elements in accordance with which traits they have, and see what they might correspond to. I don't - really know how this ties into medicine or illnesses, but I guess we'll find out."

"We also see the cycles in traditional Chinese medicine-- the wood feeds the fire, the fire produces the earth, the earth bears the metal, the metal collects the water, the water nourishes the wood. I wonder if you see the cycles in Avicenna."

...those don't really sound like real cycles but she's writing them down anyway. Like, she supposes there's a sense in which fire produces earth, like, metamorphic or igneous rocks or something, but does metal meaningfully collect water? Can't lots of things do that?

"Maybe? I think - it looks like the first book does have a section talking about cosmology and the relationships between the elements, over here, so maybe it has something like that there?"