Renaissance Causes; Treatment & Prevention

Question 1

Supernatural ideas

Religion, the supernatural etc.

Answer 1

Catholic church had huge amount of power but began to fade away because of Protestants who were unsatisfied with the church’s power and organisation and the church’s began to be challenged.

Question 2

Rational ideas

Answer 2

Scientists & Philosophers began to challenge old ideas , intellectual people by the 17th Century were happy to accept rational and natural ideas about disease.

Question 3

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Answer 3

By 1683, with funding from the Royal Society, he had developed microscopes that were powerful enough to see tiny “animalcules” in plaque scraped from teeth. In 1702, he published Philosophical Transactions with illustrations of weeds growing in water with “animalcules” around them.

Question 4

Thomas Sydenham

Answer 4

He thought disease belonged to families, he theorised the nature of the patient had little to do with what was affecting them. Famous book = Observationes Medicae (1676)

Question 5

Similarities in what people thought caused disease compared to Medieval Britain

Answer 5

• Belief in miasma/miasmata.
• The Theory of the Four Humours - although by 1700 it had been discredited, it was still believed by the wider population of Britain.
• God’s role in causing illness - the wider population of Britain held on to superstitious beliefs longer than the intellectual classes who were becoming more and more scientific in the 1600s. God’s role was particularly still seen in times of epidemic diseases like Plague.

Question 6

Differences in what people thought caused disease compared to Medieval Britain

Answer 6

• In 1526, Paracelsus theorised that disease was caused by problems with chemicals inside the body.
• In 1546, Fracastoro wrote On Contagion, which suggested disease was caused by seeds in the air.
• In 1648, Van Helmont claimed that digestion happened because of stomach acid not the Four Humours.
• In 1676, Observations Medicae theorised disease was separate from the patient.
• By 1683, Microscopes were powerful enough to see “little animals”.

Question 7

Change in approaches to treatment

Answer 7

The new method of transference - people believed that if you rubbed an object with what was bothering you, e.g. a wart, it would move on to that object. Herbal remedies got more exotic because of England’s global exploration at the time. People began to experiment with chemicals

Question 8

Continuity in approaches to treatment

Answer 8

Bleeding, sweating and purging were all popular ways of “re-balancing the humours”.
Herbal remedies remained popular and people began to think more deeply about certain remedies might help certain illnesses (e.g. using the colour of the herb)

Question 9

Change in approaches to prevention

Answer 9

Bathing actually became less fashionable because of the growth of a killer disease called syphilis and rumours spread that it could be caught by bathing.
More steps were taken to purify the air with home owners being fined for not cleaning up the streets outside their house.

Question 10

Continuity in approaches to prevention

Answer 10

People retained a strong belief in someone’s constitution (linking to the Four Humours). E.g. if someone was born small or weak, this would explain early death. People still practiced avoidance by never having too much of anything and having things in “moderation”. People still followed regimen sanitatis, however by the end of the century, people just tried to move away from any particularly dirty areas all together.

Question 11

Paracelsus

Answer 11

In the 1500s, he argued that cures needed to be developed that could attack disease. He experimented with early chemical cures such as arsenic and mercury.

Question 12

Exact examples of herbal treatments

Answer 12

• Yellow herbs such as saffron to treat jaundice.
• Drinking red wine and wearing red clothes to cure small pox.
• Vervain to expel stomach worms and keep the liver healthy.
• Cinchona bark from Peru to treat Malaria.
  (actually worked for a time if it was continually taken)
  People experimented with the new arrival of coffee.

Question 13

Exact examples of new style treatments

Answer 13

• Medical chemistry in the 17th century.
• The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis published in 1618 included details on 122 chemical treatments including mercury and antimony, which was shown to cool the body down if given in small doses.
• Antimony potassium tartrate was said to become popular after 1657 when it was said to have cured Louis XIV of France of typhoid fever.

Question 14

Preventions

Answer 14

Regimen sanitatis (a continuation from Medieval times). Moving away became popular by the end of the period.