What is the name of little people in people (old medicinal belief)

Question

I seem to remember that there was a term for "little people in people", which was a medicinal belief in the Middle Ages (I don't know, okay?), where, before bacteria and other microscopic things were discovered, people believed that little humans lived inside them and when these little humans were unhappy, this made you sick.

I cannot remember what this was called, and hopefully you understood roughly what I meant (I know it was a bad definition, I don't know how to explain it exactly).

Thanks for reading this, and if you know what I mean, please reply to this ASAP.

Answer 1

I think you're thinking of the word homunculus, which means "little (hu)man" in Latin.

In the Middle Ages, I believe this actually was used most often to refer to hypothetical miniature embryos contained in a man's sperm, or to a miniature adult human being created artificially by an alchemist.

But in philosophy, the term has come to be used for the concept that people's mental processes are carried by by some internal entity that is itself capable of some kind of "thought" or mental process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument).