Medicine Flashcards
How and why did the church run hospitals
Many priests and monks were doctors
The church taught that it was part of peoples religious duty to take care of the sick and poor
Therefore almost wall of the hospitals in Europe were run by the church
They were mainly designed for caring rather than curing
What treatments used in the medieval time period are still being used in the renaissance time period
Not much changed from medieval time period
Herbal remedies( new plants brought to England from the new world e.g bark from the cinchona tree treated malaria)
Treatments based on Hippocrates T4H and Galens theory of opposites e.g blood letting and purging
Opium treated pain
What did doctors in the renaissance say caused disease
What treatments did they use
Still didn’t what caused disease and therefore couldn’t treat disease effectively
Therefore they had lots of different cures to choose from none particularly effective
Didn’t have one proven method of curing disease
Many treatments had no scientific basis
How did the church continue to promote more natural explanations of disease
The church was the only organisation that tried to keep alive the medical ideas of Ancient Greece and Rome
Monasteries preserved many of the manuscripts of Galen and often wrote about herbs and medicines
The church opened medical schools and taught the ideas of Galen
How else did the church influence medicine in the medieval time period
Promoted cures such as pilgrimages to places like Canterbury where saints were believed to perform miracles
Flogging the mentally I’ll to drive out demons
Explain the discoveries made by pare
Gun shot wound old method- cauterised with a red hot iron or boiling oil
Pare’s method-mixed his own ointment of rose oil, turpentine and egg yolk
Stop bleeding old method- pressed a red hot iron called a cautery against the stump which sealed the blood vessels and stop patients bleeding to death but was agonising
Pare’s method- tie silk thread around each blood vessel to close them up- this is called ligatures
Explain how the factor of war influenced surgery in the 20th century
- blood loss
During ww1 Karl Landsteiner divided blood into groups, the problem of bleeding was solved. Some of these blood groups could not be mixed
Clotting on contact with air was solved in ww1 by using sodium citrate
Explain how the factor of war influenced surgery in the 20th century
- plastic surgery
The development of new weapons in the 20th century meant that the number and type of facial and skin wounds increased. In Britain, Harold Giles set up a unit in 1917 to treat horrific wounds inflicted by war. Gillies and his colleagues treated over 5000 servicemen
What supernatural causes and treatments of disease did the church promote
Very influential in explaining why people got ill and how to treat the sick e.g supernatural explanations of disease were common.
God and saints were thought to have intervened in daily life, having the true power to make people sick or care for them.
The church also taught that Gods sent disease and misfortune as a punishment or as a test of faith
And mental illness was where people were possessed by the devil
What was quackery
What were their treatments
What disease their treatment cured
How they promoted their treatments
Quacker- travelling salesmen selling cure all’s
Sold as a preventative cure
Most famous was Daffy’s elixir supposed to cure all store of disease such as constipation, fits, worms, gout, kidney stones.
All it did was cure constipation as it was a perfect laxative
Sellers tended to be charming and charismatic played on people’s fear of getting disease like the plague
Fancy packing, a famous client and newspaper would help sell the cure
Who’s did Alexander Fleming influence with his work and what did these people do as a result
Flemings work influenced the work of Florey and Chain to experiment and extract penicillin from the mould.
Ince they secured funding they mass produced the drug which enabled them to start clinical trials to see how it worked on patients with bacterial infections
How did Louis Pasteur use scientific methods to discover that germs caused disease
In a series of careful experiments he proved that the microbes that caused things to go bad floated around in the air
He used a microscope to see the bacteria in alcohol that was making beer go bad
Used a swan neck flask to prevent germs getting into the liquid so it didn’t turn sour
Who did Louis Pasteur influence with his work and what did this person discover as a result
Pasteur was not a doctor so he couldn’t prove that germs caused disease in humans
Published his results in 1864 and Robert Koch, a German doctor was able to experiment with isolating germs using chemical dyes to enable him to link specific germs such as tuberculosis and typhoid.
Paul Ehrlich was able to produce a magical bullet to kill germs that caused the disease syphillis
How did Christianity affect mediaeval medicine?
The Christian church believed in following example of Jesus who healed the sick. Therefore Christians believed it was good to look after the sick.
God sent illness as a punishment, e.g. mental illness, or a test of faith so curing an illness would challenge gods will
Monks preserved and copied by hand, ancient, medical text
Prayers were the most important treatment rather than drugs
Christians believed in caring for the sick and started many hospitals ; over 700 per set up in England between 1000 and 1500
The church believed in miraculous healing, and the sick were encouraged to visit, shrines a pilgrimage with the relics of a holy person, and prayed to saints to cure the illness
What was a natural cause of disease?
Christian church, approves of the knowledge of the ancient, Greeks and Romans ; Galen, although he lived in Roman times, believed in one God, this is fitted with Christian ideas
Doctors use clinical observations, chicken for pulse and urine, the four humours
Super natural cause of disease
Many diseases that Hippocratic in Galenic medicines cannot cure for these diseases, supernatural ideas, influence doctors treatments
Doctors checked potions of the stars, recommended charms and prayers
What did doctors base the natural cures on?
Mediaeval doctors base, their natural cures on ancient Greek theory of illness which involve the equal balance of the body of four humours -blood phlegm, black bile and yellow bile.
They believed that a person became ill when they were out of balance, and the doctor’s job was to restore this balance
The influence of Islamic ideas about medicine on mediaeval medicine
The Islamic religion encourage the medical learning and discoveries. The Prophet Mohammed said.” for every disease Allah has given a cure. So doctors are inspired to find them.
Muslim scientists were encouraged, discover queues, a new drugs such as Senna
In the Islamic empire, people with mental illnesses were treated with compassion
Islamic medicine valued Hippocratic in Galenic medicine and preserved and learned from the books of the ancient world
Muslim hospitals were meant for treating patients, not simply caring for them, as was the case in the Christian world
What was the theory of the four humours?
It was influenced by Greek ideas about balance. The Greeks believe that the world is made up of four elements.
When one of the humours was out of balance of the person would become ill
Gallens own ideas
He disagreed with some of the treatments recommended by Hippocrates
He use the theory of opposites to treat his patience. For example, if a woman had a cold, he might prescribe pepper.
He was a great believer in the power of bloodletting
His ideas lasted so long as he was excepted by the church, as he often spoke about the creator in his writing
What was a mediaeval surgeon?
These were sometimes educated and wealthy. They were trained in the great medical schools, but some formally trained doctors regarded surgery as manual work and we have nothing to do with it.