Medicine. How far was the progress made by the Romans continued in the middle ages? Explain your answer.

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How far was the progress made by the Romans continued in the middle ages? Explain your answer.

In the Roman period, it was commonly thought that disease was brought by the alignment of the stars. They believed that looking into astrology was the key thing to finding out why diseases occurred, for example, if a planet was lined up with another. Another belief for why diseases occurred was that there were evil creatures too tiny to be seen that were causing people’s illnesses. This is very much true as nowadays we know about germs and how they can cause illness, showing that the Romans were on the right track for some part. Lastly, poisonous vapours in the air were also to blame for diseases. These theories were made by scientists in the Roman period, and lasted until the nineteenth century.

Treatments for diseases consisted of many herbal remedies that were passed down through generations. A book called the “Herbarium” was written by Dioscorides, a roman army doctor. This book contained around 600 herbal remedies for all different types of illnesses. Some Roman doctors had come over from Greece meaning that they remained to have the belief that the four humours affected a person’s health. For example, if the patient was hot, the doctor would try to cool them down using things such as a cucumber. People also believed that praying to the Gods would help them recover from their illnesses, as they had Gods for specific things e.g. health.

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The Romans did develop the first hospitals. These were firstly set up for the soldiers of the time and they were free for them. Working there would be military nurses and skilled surgeons who built on the Greeks ideas about physiology and anatomy. However, as they did not possess the anaesthetic we have today, operations during that time was very painful and due to the fact they still didn’t have a lot of knowledge about infections as we do today, many of the patients that were treated died.

During this period, many medical schools opened and the research that went ...

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Although this essay has a lot of detail and knowledge of the Roman and Medieval periods it does not focus enough on the comparison between the two times to show if progress was sustained. The key example to show that progress was not made should have been public health and there should have been a detailed comparison. ***