II Figure 2. The ancient E concept of WHDW, a dange principle contained in the ter portion of the intestine. The hieroglyph(not pronounced) w zj ply means" something d have been submitted in infancy to nonreligious circumcision [8]. History is rarely irrelevant.) The ancient Greeks either adopted or reinvented the concepts of autointoxication from the gut and from the brain, as I just mentioned, and elaborated on them a great deal. Our major sources of information are the Hippocratic books. In them we also find two key words that concern us: sepsis and pepsis, which form a sort of yin and yang (figure 4). They cannot be translated exactly, but in essence they represented two forms of biological breakdown: Sepsis was very close to our concept of putrefaction and implied a bad smell, whereas pepsis was a composite of" cooking,"" maturation,"" digestion" and" fermentation"(scholars usually translate it as" coction" or" concoction."* Both could occur within the body; medically, pepsis was seen as helpful, whereas sepsis was always dangerous. In this essay I will use sepsis for putrefaction and o-\