The role of Religion Flashcards
What were Christians’ ideas about medicine?
Christians believed that disease and illness was a punishment from God, due to this reason Christians believed in caring for their patients, not curing them.
How did Christians treat their patients in Medieval England?
1) They would encourage people to pray to God.
2) They would encourage people to go on a pilgrimage to visit a shrine of a holy person where they would be miraculously healed.
3) The Christian Church financed many of the 700 hospitals in England between 1000 and 1500. Here, people could recover in tidy and quiet surroundings.
What were Christian hospitals like in Medieval England?
1) They provided care not cures.
2) They varied in size from small hospitals that could accommodate 12 patients, which reflected the number of Jesus’ disciples, to ones that could house 200 patients.
3) Hospitals were attached to monasteries and were run by monks and nuns.
4) Medieval hospitals often didn’t have any doctors, but they would have a chaplain or a priest.
How did Christianity help progress medicine in Medieval times?
1) Christians believed they had a duty of care which led to them help set up hospitals.
2) They provided a place for some sick people to get treated.
3) The Church established universities throughout Europe where people could study medicine using the books of Galen and Hippocrates.
4) Monks would translate old medical texts - many arriving from the Islamic world.
How did Christianity hinder medicine in Medieval times?
1) The Church made dissection illegal, making it harder to learn about anatomy.
2) The Church supported the ideas of Galen because he said that God was the creator of human beings, which fit the Christian belief. This made his ideas hard to challenge and no new ideas were introduced.
3) Those who went against the ideas of Galen and the Church could be arrested, like Roger Bacon in 1277.
4) Some hospitals during this time would refuse to take in very sick people or women.
Who was Vesalius and how did he make his discoveries?
Vesalius was a medical professor at Padua University, Italy. He made his discoveries by dissecting criminals who were executed, this allowed him to study human anatomy more closely.
What did Vesalius discover?
He identified approximately 300 mistakes in Galen’s work, including that:
1) The human jawbone is formed from a single part, not two.
2) Women do not have one more pair of ribs than men do.
3) The human breast bone does not have 7 parts; it has 3 parts.
Vesalius released a book called ‘The Fabric of the Human Body’ which included his observations and accurate diagrams for doctors to read.
Why was Vesalius’ work significant?
1) His work encouraged other doctors to question the old medical books and to learn through first-hand experience by performing dissections. This challenged the Church as doctors were beginning to think Galen was wrong, they also starting doing dissections which were banned by the Church.
2) The illustrations in ‘On the Fabric of the Human Body’ were copied and inserted into other books.
3) Others were able to develop his work into the human anatomy further, because he provided the detailed ground work.
