It seems that the Church hindered the training of doctors. They were the only people setting up medical schools and offering basic knowledge formally. I think that without the basic knowledge this education provided, there would not have been anything to build on. It is what the Church taught that was the problem. Methods of curing people almost always involved a form of prayer. John of Gaddesden was a leading doctor in the early 1300s and he believed that writing a kind of prayer on the jaw would cure a person of toothache. We can assume that this would have been taught by the Church as it agrees with the Bible. If this was believed by a leading English doctor and the Church drummed it into you, why would you question it? The Church promised that Jesus and saints could cure people, this set young doctors believing in supernatural cures, totally the wrong course. They taught that God, the Devil or planets controlled lives. Monasteries had the only libraries and so even if you did want to question what you learnt, there would be nothing in the library to fuel your query. It would have been mostly full of Galen’s books or books supporting him. The Church liked to promote him as his ideas did not contradict the Bible.
The Church made it almost impossible for new medical knowledge to travel on a large scale. Every idea was checked to make sure it did not challange the Bible. They spread the idea of cleanliness but as far as I can see this is the only worthwhile thing that they did. They did not want anyone to be rational, as long as there were not explanations for things and people were scared of what could happen, they would want reassurance from the Church. As doctors with beliefs that the Church did not like were imprisoned, they could not tell many people about their ideas.
Though the Church helped to set up hospitals, only 10% of 1200 in England and Wales actually cared for the sick, the others were just inns or hospices under another name. Some were very small, five or six beds, a few had several hundred but if you think of the shortage of beds today and how healthy we are, even though there were fewer people in the Middle Ages I bet there were more sick so few could have been treated. The Church believed praying for your soul was enough to save your life even though they must have seen many deaths. The people that really needed medical attention like the pregnant, babies, wounded contagious or insane were often not let in. The warden could just turn you away if he so wanted. These hospitals did not have a single doctor. Though the Church introduced hospitals, I do not think that they can be regarded as hospitals. Though these may have been the basis for the development of more medical based hospitals I believe that if the Church had not have been there, somebody else would have started up a hospital. Without the wasted time building up hospitals with Church ideas such as not having doctors and not admitting many sick people I think hospitals would have developed much more quickly.
Gaddesden’s cure for toothache mentioned earlier must have been believed as Gaddesden was a leading doctor and would not have been if people had not believed his ideas. If the Church and the country believed that writing a prayer on your face cured anything then they cannot have been looking for ideas that worked, just ones to back up the Bible. As the Church liked things to be supernatural and few cures actually are, the Church cannot have been worried about actually curing people. They must have noticed that all the praying was not working so why did they not look to other things? I think it was to protect their name as it would have got a bashing if it came out that all they had been teaching about medicine for so long was wrong. Though if you actually look at the Bible, there are few cures. Though they are all supernatural, I do not think it is enough to make anyone believe that Jesus and saints are the only answer. If any effective treatments were to be found, the Church would have had to change all its beliefs. The Church hindered the search for effective treatments.
Though women did much of the medical care in villages and towns they were not allowed to train as doctors, even though they probably had a lot more practical knowledge than most men. When doctors were trained they were taught about supernatural cures where as the female village medics would have been more concerned about cures that actually worked. Doctors were not involved in childbirth, which is a big part of medicine so if they were not involved in that then they missed out on a whole area of medicine. The Church was respected so presumably doctors with a license from them would have been more respected. The female doctors that may have developed new ideas from hands-on experience would not have been licensed and so their ideas may not have been listened to. Though the Church did license doctors, I think they hindered the licensing of healers as they were licensing the wrong ones.
Though the Church would not let some ideas become common knowledge, they let a French doctor in 1349 state that you could catch the black death if somebody infected looked at you. They let the Prior and the Abbey of Christchurch say that God sent plague to rid people of their sins. They let a monk at Westminster say it was a punishment for the sin of pride. They let an unknown churchman inn 1360 say that if you dishonoured your parents then you would become ill. These are all things that would make people suspicious of themselves and others, things that would cause panic and who did people turn to in panic? The Church. These things bought more and more people into the Church. Guy de Chauliac, one of the most famous doctors in the 1300s said disease was caused by the planets. The Church let this become known even though there cannot have been any proof and people with more logical explanations for disease with evidence were not allowed to speak out. The fact that they only allowed supernatural explanations meant that people had ridiculous beliefs.
The Church believed that it was healthy to be clean and it seems that it did promote this idea but monks did put themselves first. Canterbury Cathedral had a complex water supply with filtered water piped to various areas and flushing latrines by 1153 whilst ordinary people had sewers with rotting wooden covers. It seems to me that the Church spent other people’s money on expensive buildings and luxuries and did little to help the people. However, without the Church getting basic sewage for the people maybe there would not have been anything so I think that the Church helped the development of public health.
From these accounts I can conclude that the Church hindered medical progress. Though most things had improved since the dark ages they only improved to a point. It seems to me that the Church just wanted to make sure that they were popular. If more people were healthy and had less fear and if things started to contradict the Bible then people may not have felt such a need for a faith. There is proof that this is true in the modern world. There are many people now who are either atheist or agnostic as we are healthy and do not generally live in fear for our lives and so we do not feel the need for reassurance. I also think that some members of the Church must have known that they were robbing people of their chance to make a difference, they knew that natural causes and cures were not stupid. However, I do not think that the Church was a bad thing overall. Though hospitals were generally just temporary housing, they gave people somewhere to stay and some help. They funded the little public health that there was, provided a sense of community and provided general support. I think that instead of building such elaborate places of worship they should have improved public health so ordinary people would have been better off. The main thing that they did to hinder medical progress was the way they monitored new ideas. If they had not done that, I think that medicine could have developed and Christianity would not have suffered too much.
