Medicine - Unit 1 : Medieval Medicine Flashcards
(Believed) Causes of illness
- Miasma - illness caused by bad smells
- Religious (God)
- Everyday life (accidents, poor harvest)
- Supernatural - position of stars and planets
- 4 humours - black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm
Treatments of illness
Apothecary - sell medicines, herbs and spices
University trained doctor - treated patients based on the four humours
Local ‘wise woman’ - homemade medicines and potions
Barber surgeons - hair cuts and small surgical procedures like bloodletting and tooth extraction
Trepanning - drill a hole through the skull to let demons out
Bloodletting - blood removal by opening a vein or leeching it out
Cauterisation - burning a wound to stop the blood flow
Anaesthesia - mandrake root, opium and hemlock
Hippocrates significance to medical development
- Used clinical observation : using previous info on a patient to decide on treatments and make links between illnesses
- looked at the body as a whole that needed treatment = linked parts of the body
- Believed the Four Humours needed to be in balance for someone to stay healthy
- Believed work of doctors and work by priests should be kept separate
- All illness = natural causes not supernatural causes
Galen significance to medical developments
- job as doctor in gladiator school he developed the scientific discipline of anatomy
- dissected monkeys and pigs
- Church encouraged him as he referred to the ‘Creator’ and believed in a single God = Christian ideal
- His link to the Church slowed down medicine’s progress as God = be all, end all with no other alternative ideas
- Incorrect ideas (basing human anatomy on pigs and monkeys) = slowed down medicinal developments for 1000s of years
CHRISTIAN ideas about health
- Should follow examples of Jesus to heal the sick
- Illness = from God and curing it = challenging God’s will as he sent it as punishment/test of faith
- Hippocrates and Galenic ideas = correct
CHRISTIAN treating the sick
- Hospitals = clean, quiet, small without doctors but with priests, chaplains and run by monks and nuns
- depended on charity
- asylums for the mentally ill (e.g. Bedlam in London)
- Monasteries = infirmaries with free treatment for the poor
CHRISTIAN significance to development of medicine
- training doctors in Europe after 1200 = significant today as doctors still undergo training before qualification
CHRISTIAN insignificance to development of medicine
- Taught old knowledge of Romans and Greeks rather than new ideas
- Weren’t allowed to go against Galenic teaching as it was like going against God
ISLAM ideas about health
- Hospitals for mental illness = treated with compassion (seen as victims of illness)
- Doctors permanently present and medical students trained alongside them
- Hospitals = treatments not just care e.g. Baghdad hospital set up by Caliph Al-Rashid
ISLAM treatments
- Mental illness = compassion
- hospitals provided proper treatment
- bimaristans built = care to everyone
ISLAMIC significance to the development of medicine
- Combined Greek ideas with their own = complete ideas
- Took previous research and combine with separate ideas which broadened knowledge - significant today
ISLAMIC insignificance in the development of medicine
- Reached England though trade = making money was more important than healing
- Britain wasn’t open to other religious ideas of healing
What is public health?
The general health and well-being of the population as a whole
How monasteries and abbey’s increased public health
- sanitation facilities: built from money from wool production
- pipe systems = water delivered to the lavers (wash basins)
- filtering systems = removed impurities
- washing facilities in lavatories e.g. privies
- infirmaries had good water supply
- monks preached that cleanliness = holiness
- herbs for remedies
The Black Death
- Arrived in England in 1348
- Was bubonic and spread by fleas that lived on rats and carried the bacteria Yersinia Pestis
