Historic perspective on breathing.

[Astro Pen]

"Until I draw my last breath." or "Breath of fresh air." Overused terms back through the history of story telling.
But wait, my perspective on breathing and its necessity are based on my knowledge of physiology and chemistry. How our lungs absorb oxygen and it gets shipped around the blood stream and carbon dioxide is subsequently exhaled.
Fine and dandy but this is very new knowledge in historical terms. It set me wondering what, for most of history, we believed breathing was and what its function was, other than to facilitate speech.
What did Romans, Aboriginals, Samurai or ancient Celts think breathing was for, why it, say, increased in pace when you ran?
Was it considered a function or simply part of being alive, and enabling speech, unconsidered beyond that.
They obviously knew that if you were prevented from breathing, held under water for instance, you died. But what did they think air was and why we needed it to live?

 

[AllanR]

Dum spiro spero (as I breath I hope)

From breathing to respiration - PubMed

The purpose of breathing remained an enigma for a long time. The Hippocratic school described breathing patterns but did not associate breathing with the lungs. Empedocles and Plato postulated that breathing was linked to the passage of air through pores of the skin. This was refuted by...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[Valtharius]

But what did they think air was

"The Platonic solids are prominent in the philosophy of Plato, their namesake. Plato wrote about them in the dialogue Timaeus c.360 B.C. in which he associated each of the four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) with a regular solid. Earth was associated with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, and fire with the tetrahedron. There was intuitive justification for these associations: the heat of fire feels sharp and stabbing (like little tetrahedra). Air is made of the octahedron; its minuscule components are so smooth that one can barely feel it. Water, the icosahedron, flows out of one's hand when picked up, as if it is made of tiny little balls. By contrast, a highly nonspherical solid, the hexahedron (cube) represents "earth". These clumsy little solids cause dirt to crumble and break when picked up in stark difference to the smooth flow of water.[citation needed] Moreover, the cube's being the only regular solid that tessellates Euclidean space was believed to cause the solidity of the Earth."

Platonic solid - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Astro Pen]

Thanks @AllanR That is the kind of thing I am looking for.

"Aristotle who believed that the role of breathing was to cool the heart."
That is a nice one. Something poetic about it.

 

[sknox]

I'm not sure that air was regarded quite the same way as we moderns see it. We know that air in our lungs is the same that's in the sky which is the same found in a cave or a marsh or whatever. And that is different again from the philosophical abstraction of Air, which was more like a principle informing the stuff we perceive as air.

I say this because we have accounts of people's spirits being carried on air, or that disease could strike others through breath, or that the earth itself could exhale. Beyond that, there was no doubt a wild variety of popular understandings--we would call them superstitions. I don't know of any literature on this, but it'd be interesting to see how explanations of air and breathing vary across (pre-modern) cultures.

Now that it's been brought up, the same set of questions could be asked of fire, earth, and water. And any other "elements" of traditional science.