Renaissance Medicine , c.1450-1850 Flashcards
What was the Renaissance?
A cultural movement starting in Florence Italy that same a new focus on arts, science, and knowledge.
How did the Renaissance impact attitudes?
1) Wealthy businessmen paid scholars and artists to investigate the writings of Romans and Greeks
2) Inspired people but made them critical of old texts; a new focus on accurate, original versions and experimentation with new ideas
3) Made educated people want to find out for themselves and not just accept the teachings of the Church
4) a ‘rebirth’ of learning
What invention caused the spread of the Renaissance?
The Printing Press in 1451 - it made books cheap, accurate and quick to produce. Before they were expensive and rare as they were hand copied.
What were the consequences of the Renaissance?
1) New lands from exploration led to new medicines and foods being brought to Europe
2) Printing caused new ideas to spread quickly as well as those from the ancient world
3) Art showed then human body in realistc detail e.g. Da Vinci’s illustrations
4) New inventions such as gunpowder caused new types of wounds
5) A more scientific approach to learning involving observation, hypothesis, experiment and questioning evolved.
Who was Vesalius and what was his impact?
Before Vesalius dissections were done to prove Galen was right.
Vesalius was a Belgian professor of surgery at Padua in Italy (1514-64)
Wrote The Fabric of the Human Body (1543) which was beautifull illustrated and an accurate textbook based on dissections and observations of the Human Body, where he corrected Galen’s mistakes for example that the breastbone in a human only had 3 parts not the 7 of an ape.
Did dissections himself and said medical students should learn from dissections
What was the reaction to Vesalius?
He was criticised for saying Galen was wrong and had to leave his job at Padua but later became Emperor Charles V’s doctor.
Who was Ambroise Pare (1510-90)?
The most famous Renaissance surgeon in Europe.
1537 - used a cream of rose oil, egg white and turpentine rather than hot oil to treat gunshot wounds. His patients healed well and he wrote a book.
Pare used ligatures or threat and invented the ‘crows beak clamp’ to halt bleeding rather than cauterising which was less painful, but could introduce infection.
He designed false limbs for wounded solders.
Used Vesalius in his book Works on Surgery (1575) which was read widely by English surgeons.
Wrote that gunshot wounds were not poisonous which had been the prior belief.
Who was William Harvey (1578-1657)?
An English doctor who challenged Galen by saying the blood circulated around the body. Galen had said new blood was constantly made in the liver.
Harvey dissected and studied human hearts. He experimented with pumping liquid the wrong way through the heart, proving that blood could only go round one way.
He waited 12 years before publishing De Motu Cordis (1628) about the circulation of bloody because he know there would be criticism about his go against Galen and the idea of bloodletting and humours.
What did Harvey’s critics say?
That he was made or they ignored his ideas. Some doctors rejected his theory because he was contradicting Galen, or because they did not believe his calculations.
Despite this his theory was accepted by many doctors. It wasn’t until 1661 that a good enough microscope was made to see the capillaries connecting veins and arteries.
What did Culpeper contribute?
Wrote the Complete Herbal in 1653
Used plants and astrology in his treatments
Highly critical of bloodletting and purging
What did Thomas Sydenham do?
Stressed the careful observation of symptoms and was critical of quack medicine.
Noted the symptoms of scarlet fever and used iron to treat anaemia
Dismissed the value of dissection and ignored Harvey’s discovery
Still used bleeding methods for treatment
His book Medical Observations (1676) became a standard textbook
(Evidence of merging between old and new ideas)
Treatments in the Renaissance included?
Bloodletting
Herbal rememdies such as using the bark of the Cinchona tree which contained quinine for malaria
Opium from Turkey was used as an anaesthetic
Lemons and limes for scurvy (discovered by Woodall in 1617)
Belief in the power of the royal touch to cure the disease of scrofula
Who treated people in the 17th and 18th centuries?
Barber surgeons - poorly trained, could give a haircut and do small operations like teeth pulling or bloodletting
Apothecaries - little to no medical training, but sold medicines and potions
Wise Women - treatments relied on superstition, but had large amounts of knowledge of plants and herbs
Quacks - showy, travelling salesmen who sold all sorts of medicines and cure-alls
Trained doctors - mixture of new and traditional knowledge, cost money still.
How many people in London died from the Great Plague in 1665?
100,000 (1/4 of the city’s population) and thousands in the rest of the country
What remedies and treatments were there for the Great Plague (1665)?
- Bleeding with leeches
- Smoking to keep away the poisoned air
- Sniffing a sponge soaked in vinegar
- Using animals such as frogs, pigeons, snakes and scorpions to draw out the poison
- Moving to the countryside to avoid catching the black, Charles II did this
