 These fragments seem related to ancient medicine, with its theory of the proper mixture of hot and cold, dry and wet as constituting the healthy condition of the body (recall that we are told that Empedocles was a physician as well as a philosopher and poet). However, the extant fragments do not show any detailed connection with medical explanations. The equal proportion in the mixture of blood does seem related to another kind of explanation. Blood has a central role to play in Empedocles’ account of biological processes, to which we now turn; among other things, it is that whereby men think (B 105 = D 240). It appears that the equal mixture allows discrimination of all things (since, of course, all things are made up of the four elements in differing proportions).