Why did medical care need to be improved during the early 19th century

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Medicine Coursework

The sources partly explain why Medical Care, Surgery and Nursing needed to be improved during the 19th Century.

During the early 19th Century Surgery needed to be improved because 80% of people who had surgery would die during or soon after the surgery had taken place. During surgery there was very little done to stop pain, and surgeons thought that the best option was to go for speed so that the pain was a quick as possible, unfortunately many patience bled to death during their operation because nothing was put in place to stop blood loss. If people were lucky enough to survive their operation then they would probably end up dying in aftercare, Hospitals were far and few between and mostly in big cities, and they were very dirty, smelly and germ infested places to be, hospitals were probably the worst place to be when recovering from an operation. Nursing needed to be improved during the early 19th Century because most nurses were seen as drunken prostitutes who didn’t care for their patience but only for themselves, they didn’t really care for looking after the patients and attending to their needs and they would even take the patients medication and drink for themselves, so the lack of aftercare of an operation was a big killer for patience. As well as the care given from nurses there was also the problem with the lack of medicines. In the early 19th Century, most people would visit the Lady of the Manor, who lived in villages and was very rich for sickness. Depending on the personality of the lady of the manor, she may only let certain people in to see her, if people were poor and living on the streets then they may not let people in to see them. Other poor people would visit the Wise Woman, she was is small villages and towns and were trusted for their deep knowledge of herbs and other treatments, but if anything was to go wrong then she would be accused of being a witch and killed. Other places for that the poorest people visited where the Travelling Quack, they always moved from towns to towns and country to country selling potions that they had made, although some did study about how to help people, most just wanted the money, and didn’t care about the effects of what they were offering would do to the potions, because of this they were very unreliable and where only used by the poorest of the poor. Weather being rich or poor, a lot of people also first went to other members of the family for help with sickness and illness. In the early 18th Century the hospitals that were available where mostly in big cities and were mostly private which cost a lot of money for patients to be treated. In the hospitals there were Physicians who where fully qualified doctors and were able to treat patients, although they were able to, they did not do it very well in the early 19th Century because they lacked the knowledge and believed in spontaneous generation, which was that things just appeared from nowhere, for example, if you put flour and sugar together in a cellar, then mice and rats would just appear out of nowhere. People who studied medicine also believe that the body was made up of four fluids that were blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Surgeons were also in hospitals and were seen as second class doctor by the Physicians and they dealt with anything internally with the body which was very painful. There were midwifes who helped to deliver babies, but if a delivery became a problem then they would just transfer them to the Physician. Lastly there were Apothecary’s who gave out the medicines that had been subscribed by Physicians. So everyone in hospitals who were licensed by the government still had very little knowledge and didn’t know very much about how things actually worked.

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Source A is a Cartoon image showing the old style of nursing, and was published in 1879, it shows what looks like a sleeping nurse and a patient in a bed that is in a lot of pain, this is not how nurses should act and therefore shows that nursing needed to be improved. Source B is an extract from a book published in 1927 called “Lister as I knew him”, it explains about how hygiene within hospitals needed to be improved. Source C is a print of an Amputation from the early 19th Century; the patient looks like he is ...

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