1700s Flashcards
Who built hospitals in the 1700s?
In the 1700s hospitals began to become places to be healed instead of just looking after the sick until they died.
Guy’s hospital (1724) was founded by a merchant called Thomas Guy, who was a businessman.
Hospitals were also built by ‘private subscription’ when local people club together to pay for the construction and running of a hospital.
What treatments were available to ordinary people in the 1700s?
Barber surgeons – Poorly trained people who would give small operations like bloodletting or tooth pulling.
Apothecaries – Had little or no medical training, sold medicines and potions.
Wisewomen – Their treatments relied on superstition. However, they had extensive knowledge of plants and herbs
Quacks – travelling salesman who sold all sorts of medicines and ’cure-alls’
What happened in these new hospitals?
Not only were the sick cared for, but the doctors of the future received training.
Medical schools were often attached to hospitals.
Individual wards were developed for different types of diseases.
The types of treatment given in hospitals still primarily based on the four humours approach of bloodletting and purging.
Towards the end of the 18th century hospitals added dispensaries where the poor would be given medicines without any charge.
Which diseases increased child mortality rates in the 1700s ?
Typhus and Influenza in the 1720s and 30s
What happened as a result of these epidemics?
Thomas Coram gathered enough public support to build a hospital for sickly or poor children who were abandoned on the streets.
He founded the Foundling Hospital in 1741 and educated them up to the age of 15.
How did attitudes towards disease change in the 1700s?
People began to abandon the idea that illness was a punishment for sin.
They began to think that illness could be dealt with from a more evidence-based, scientific point of view.
Who was John Hunter?
He was an army surgeon in 1760 and became the surgeon for king George II
He supported the method of clinical observation and used this method during surgery.
Ŵhåt wâś ïñòçüłätīøñ ¿
It started in mediaeval China to prevent smallpox.
They scraped a puss or scabs from a small pox victim onto healthy peoples skin.
This allowed the patient to build up a resistance against the disease.
In 1721 smallpox inoculation is was in demand in Britain.
Lady Mary Montague brought inoculation into England.
What were the problems with inoculation at first?
Some people argued that God sent illness to test peoples faith so preventing sickness with inoculation was wrong.
As the idea of germs was not understood at the time, it was hard for people to accept the idea of inoculation to prevent disease.
Sometimes inoculation gave people a strong dose of smallpox, which could kill them.
I’m not collated people could still pass smallpox to others.
The poorest people could not afford inoculation
When did inoculation become popular?
In the 1740s and 1750s
What did Edward Jenner do?
Smallpox inoculation was a well-known treatment before Edward Jenner became the surgeon.
Edward Jenner had stories that milkmaids who caught cowpox were protected against smallpox.
In Gloucestershire in 1796, Jenner inserted cowpox into an eight-year-old boy.
Six weeks later, he gave the boy smallpox inoculation and no disease was found.
He called this method vaccination after the Latin word for cow “vacca”
How were people opposed to Jenner’s discoveries?
He published his vaccination findings in 1798
He couldn’t explain how vaccination worked, which made it difficult for others to except it.
Many doctors profited from small box inoculation so they disliked his findings.
Jenner was not a fashionable city doctor, so there was snobbery against him.
However Jenner had powerful supporters and parliament agreed to give him £10,000 for his research in 1802.
What impact did Jenner’s discoveries have?
Attitudes changed as people eventually realised that vaccination was more affective and less dangerous than inoculation.
By the 1800s doctors were using his technique in America and Europe.
In 1853 the British government made smallpox vaccination compulsory
