Another development was travel. People were now beginning to travel abroad, to places like America, where they learned new techniques of treating sick people, but they also bought new ingredients back for medicines and cures. They also travelled to the Arab world as well at the end of the Middle Ages, where there was quite a lot of competition between European and Arab doctors as to who was the better doctor. All this was big progress in the Renaissance.
A new invention during the end of the Middle Ages was the printing press. Doctors were now able to write books, and they could publish hundreds of copies without the monks having to hand write them. This was an excellent invention because now other doctors could read them and so could members of the public, so everyone is gaining more knowledge about the body and how it works.
War also helped medicine. During wars there were new wounds to treat and heal such as gunshot wounds etc. This effected medicine because people were again, learning new methods of treating people.
Individuals
Versalius: Versalius was a very important figure in history. He proved Galen wrong. Galen had said that there were two bones in the jaw, but Versalius proved that there was only one. This didn’t go down very well because people had believed in Galen and his ideas for hundreds of years, and the church really like Galen as well, because he believed that it was God who created the body. But Versalius began doing lots of dissections and people eventually could see that he was telling the truth. Versalius also published books and with the printing press they were widely popular.
Harvey: Harvey was also important. He discovered lots about the circulation of blood around the body. Harvey also proved Galen wrong. Galen had claimed that blood was burnt up in the muscles, but Harvey proved this was, in fact, impossible. He then discovered that blood only travelled around the body in one direction. He did experiments to prove this. He would insert a probe into the vein, and then slide it up and down. It would slide easily one way, but then it wouldn’t the other way, so it would be the same with blood. Harvey then wrote a book called ‘Anatomical Account of the Motion of the Heart and Blood’. Ultimately this was the end of Galen as no one believed his theories any more, not after a lot of them had been proved wrong.
Pare: Pare was a doctor with the French army on its campaigns. He had to treat wounds that he hadn’t seen before, such as gunshot wounds etc. He was always told to put cautery oil on the wound to cauterise it. But then this ran out so he had no choice but to put egg yolk and rose oil on the wound. He went to sleep that night very uneasy, convinced that he had poisoned his patients. He awoke very early the next morning and went to check on his patients. To his great surprise they were healing better than the patients with cautery oil on them. He vowed never to use cautery oil again.
Ideas and how they changed
The Great Plague: In 1665 there was another plague. This time more was done to try and stop it spreading. It didn’t work, however, and the plague only ended when the cold weather came.
Some of the methods that they used to try and stop it are:
- Surgeons would check the dead to see if they did die of the plague.
- Funerals for the dead were held at night, and the family and friends of the dead person were not allowed to attend.
- If a household had a trace of the plague in it, then ‘searchers’ or ‘examiners’ would shut the house up for one month, and the inhabitants weren’t allowed to leave the house.
- Special ‘constables’ checked that no one left these houses.
- Stray animals such as dogs and pigs were killed.
- Places of quarantine were set up. These were called ‘Pest houses’.
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‘Rakers’ came round and collected all the waste that the household had been given the job of collecting up in the first place.
As I said, none of these really worked, but they have to have credit for trying. It shows that they still don’t really know what causes disease, but they knew (or guessed) that dirty streets didn’t help and that if someone had the plague, they shouldn’t go near anyone else. They sort of knew about germs. They said that there was nasty monsters, but they didn’t know what they were or how the spread, but they knew a lot more than they did in the Black Death, where practically none of this measures were enforced, because they were not as well informed about it all.
Conclusion
The Renaissance was about changes in ideas and attitudes but this did not increase life expectancy because not all of the new ideas were correct, and therefore some people were still dying and also the streets were hardly any cleaner, and because they were so dirty, people were getting ill that way. Rats, lice and fleas were a part of everyday life for most people. Houses were made of wood, mud and horse dung. The Renaissance writer, Erasmus, gave a description of the floors in English houses as being full of
‘...spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that has been thrown out, remnants of fishes and filth unnameable.’
So quite a lot of progress had been made, but not all of it helped life expectancy very much, and the streets were all dirty.
