Empedocles also plays an important role in the development of the Western or Sicilian school of Greek medicine.

He articulates the notion that the human body has four humors: blood, bile, black bile, and phlegm, a belief which is to dominate medical thinking for centuries.

He had cured a plague at the Sicilian city of Selinus and claimed he was a god. (One legend, which forms the basis of Matthew Arnold's poem Empedocles on Etna, held that Empedocles, tired of life and wanting people to believe that the gods had taken him with them, committed suicide by leaping into the crater of Mount Etna, but he may actually have died in Greece.)