The Renaissance was a time of good medical progress but very few practical advantages

University Degree Medicine and Dentistry

Samantha Canvin Mr. Mungles

10DA History

Assessment Essay: The Renaissance.

Hypothesis

“The Renaissance was a time of good medical progress but very few practical advantages.”

Introduction

The Renaissance means rebirth, part of this was the rebirth of medicine. It was a time when the Greek ideas on medicine and methods of scientific investigation were rediscovered. People began to question the rules of the Middle Ages. They began to investigate and experiment for the best treatments and real causes of disease. It began with the Arabs coming to Italy, showing the Europeans the old Greek ideas.

What caused people to be healthy or unhealthy in the Renaissance?

The same things that caused people to be unhealthy in the Middle Ages were there in the Renaissance. People relied very much upon the land, if there was a bad harvest, it would lead to famine, malnutrition and ill health causing people to die. If there was a good harvest then people would live well as they would live in healthier conditions. Public health had improved a little from the Middle Ages, most improvements were due to the plague in the 17th century but the connection between lack of hygiene and disease had still not been made. Most public health measures were to take the smell (which they thought caused disease) of waste – and the waste itself – away and into the river, were it would pollute the water.

The Great Plague started in 1665, brought into the country by trading ships who carried the infection on lice infested rats. The Plague spread across the country gradually, killing 65,000 people in London alone. A law was passed to keep the streets clean, employing rakers who daily swept the streets. Examiners would find infected houses which would be marked and closed up. Surgeons checked the dead to record incidences of the disease, and the dead were buried in deep graves. All small animals were culled, and decaying food was cleared. Beggars and other travellers were banned from cities on penalty of death. Gatherings and all social events were stopped, and a watch was kept on ale houses to make sure they were orderly. Sources at the time (journals and diaries) showed that people at the time thought that the infection was spread by contact with others. Some thought it was caused by God, and some thought it was spread by air on tiny creatures, this theory (although frowned upon at the time) became known as the Germ theory. Most of the public health measures that were introduced slowed the spread of the Plague, but a few made no difference or made things worse, such a public prayers, or the culling of cats and dogs who would have killed more rats.

There were also many wars during the Renaissance. The English Civil war, the French Revolution and the Anglo-Dutch Revolution all took place in the 17th century. Thousands of people died, and valuable experience was gained by the surgeons who treated the injured. Ambroise Paré (1510 – 1590) became an army surgeon after training in Paris, and was a major figure in the development of surgery in the Renaissance.

What ideas did people have about the causes and treatments of illnesses in the Renaissance?

Many thoughts about the causes and treatments of disease didn’t change in the Renaissance from the Middle Ages for a long time. They believed in diseases sent by god, diseases due to the alignment of the planets or bad air or due to the imbalance of the humours. Though they did have microscopes, ones powerful enough to see bacteria were not discovered until 1830 and the discovery of oxygen in the air was not discovered until 1777. This meant many treatments were the same as in the middle ages; praying, purging, bleeding and herbal remedies. War aided the development of treatments for the injured. By forcing innovation during the heat of battle. Doctors there would treat many wounds, gaining valuable experience. Some doctors like Ambroise Pare would be forced to innovate a treatment if they did not have enough materials to continue the textbook treatment. In his case, he ran out of boiling oil to cauterise wounds. He mixed a simple poultice and applied it to the soldiers’ wounds, the next day he was surprised to find that the men he had treated in this manner were much healthier than those treated with boiling oil. Later he found that instead of stopping bleeding by burning the vessels with a hot iron, he could tie them up with silk ligatures. This was very much in the spirit of the Renaissance, to challenge old ideas, and to test new ones. Unfortunately his methods were not popular among other surgeons. Especially when they discovered that the tread used for the ligatures could actually carry infections into the wound.

Who provided medical care in the Renaissance?

There were 8 main types of healers in the Renaissance. The first was the family member (almost always the woman), looking after the daily care of her family. Then there would be the Wise woman, or the Travelling quack.

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Who provided medical care in the Renaissance?

The Wise woman would have no formal training, but would have spent most of her life learning and practising her ways. Her treatments were often local remedies, mixing those that were proven to work, with superstitious methods. In the Middle Ages Wise women were called White witches or sorceresses, and were considered to be generally good. But in the Renaissance there were new religious factions, such as the Protestants and the Puritans. These people came the think of witches as evil Satan worshippers. Wise women would often get burned at the stake if they killed a patient.

Travelling quacks moved from town to town, selling potions which often were just river water (which would often kill you). They had no training and were often just in it for profit. Some would gain some knowledge through plying their trade.

There were healers like the Lady of the manor who would learn basic medicine from reading books written by Physicians and would look after those people that lived on her estate. The Apothecary spent many years in an apprenticeship, mixing potions for the Physician, they were not supposed to treat the sick, but many did for a small fee.

Midwives were licensed to supervise the last week and the delivery of a baby, the invention of the surgical forceps that only Physicians and surgeons could use meant that Midwives were being forced out of healing.

The surgeon often worked in armies, or doubled as a barber. He was more of a practical doctor than the Physician, they spent many years in an apprenticeship and were also licensed and they were looked down upon by Physicians as second class doctors.

The Physician spent 14 years at university, they knew all the works of Galen, including the latest works of doctors like Vesalius and Harvey. The charged high fees, the equivalent of a month’s pay for the average worker, so only the wealthy could afford to be treated by a physician.

What caused diagnoses and treatments to remain the same or to change in the Renaissance?

It was often the discovery of an individual that caused medical change in the Renaissance. Some of these individuals were:

Tomas Linacre (c. 1460-1524). England was cut off from many developments in the progression of medicine on the Continent. Linacre was one of the few English doctors to travel abroad. Linacre studied to be a doctor at Padua in Italy. When he returned to England he became one of Henry VIII’s physicians. Linacre was also a classical scholar, capable of translating medical works from Greek to Latin, which was very useful at the time, as many people could read Latin, and not Greek.

As one of Henry VIII’s physicians, he used his influence to obtain a Royal Charter which established the Royal College of Physicians in 1518. The society set qualifications that were required to gain a licence which would allow you to practise as a physician in London and later the whole of England. This new licencing was important as it ensured a reasonable level of skill from each physician practising in England (although the Royal College often acted out of self-interest rather than out of interest for the patients). He also enabled Galen’s works much more accessible to medical students by translating them from Greek to Latin, even though many of Galen’s ideas were later challenged by the works of Vesalius and Harvey.

Paracelsus or Theophrastus Bombastus of Hohenheim (1493-1541) was a Swiss Physician and philosopher who is now recognised as a man 500 years ahead of his time. His brilliance was evident to all around him, but his extreme methods and ideas got him into a lot of trouble, one time publicly burning writings of Avicenna and Galen in 1527. He was the first physician ever to lecture in the language of the street, rather than in the academics’ Latin. He first identified the placebo effect, stressing the importance of suggestion in treatments of the patient, using signs and amulets to help a patient form mental images, which translated into profound physical cures. He relied heavily on experience, experiments and observations of nature and reason insisting that “The way to investigate nature is to travel her books with your feet.” He did not dismiss the relationship between medicine and religion, but viewed religion as more a mental, personal thing than anything to do with a supreme being, much in the same way as many people do today with medicine and psychology.

He invented chemical urinalysis, chemical therapy and suggested a biochemical theory of digestion. He demanded that the use of cow dung, feathers and other “Obnoxious concoctions” that were used in treating wounds be given up in favour of keeping wounds clean, stating, “If you prevent infection, Nature will heal the wound all by herself.” Thus anticipating modern use of antiseptics by several centuries.

He produced the most comprehensive clinical description of syphilis ever produced from the period and he was the first to perceive the disease could only be contracted by contact. He was the also discoverer of the mercury treatment for syphilis. Probably his most important theory was the Germ theory, in his proposal that diseases were entities in themselves, entering the body from outside, rather than actually coming from decaying matter inside the body.

He called for humane treatments of the mentally ill, seeing them not as creatures possessed by evil spirits, but ‘brothers ensnared in a treatable malady.’

He re-introduced clinical diagnosis and the administration of highly specific medicines, rather than the tradition cure-all remedies of the time.

He recommended the use of iron for ‘poor blood.’ He also created the terms ‘chemistry,’ ‘gas,’ and ‘alcohol’ and discovered that zinc was the active ingredient in the production of brass.

He was regarded as a most complex man, combining a high degree of skilled observation with a variety of superstitious beliefs. But he had already made the leap that many of the time had not, magic and superstitious treatments were not so much what cured the person, in his opinion, but the effect of the suggestion on the person that cured them. To him the advancement of practical therapy depended upon a continuous exploration of the invisible side of nature – a search for causes – and the realisation that the man was not simply a physical creature, but a living soul whose internal attitudes could profoundly affect his health.

Paracelsus states, “A man who is angry is not only angry in his head or in his fist, but all over… all the organs of the body, and the body itself, are only form-manifestations of previously and universally existing mental states.”

Paracelsus was truly a man ahead of his times. So much so that he was often labelled a heretic and his ideas were greatly ignored until their rediscovery during the industrial period. If his theories had been accepted at the time, then medicine would have probably been much more advanced than they were.

Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) trained as a barber-surgeon, later joining the French army as a surgeon. France was involved in many wars during the 16th century, allowing Paré to gain much practical experience. In an attempt to stop soldiers’ wounds from bleeding, they were usually scorched with burning oil or a hot iron in order to seal them. During a battle Paré ran out of oil and so had to come up with an alternative treatment. He made a dressing out of egg whites, oil of roses and turpentine (a dressing used by the Romans several thousand years ago) which was then applied to the wound. The dressing both sealed the wound and provided some relief from the pain. He developed the use of ligatures to tie off blood vessels after an amputation in order to stop bleeding, though this was dangerous as it carried infection into the wound. Also found that by tightening a belt (that would later become a tourniquet) around an artery, the blood supply would be stemmed.

Unfortunately very few surgeons adopted Paré’s ideas. As he had no formal medical training, physicians did not take him very seriously. He did not receive the recognition at the time that he deserved, and so his ideas did not help to change practical medicine until after his death.

Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), born in Brussels. He studied in Paris and went on to become Professor of Anatomy in Padua, Italy, meeting many artists there that would dissect and draw pictures of the human body. In 1543 he wrote the first major book on anatomy called ‘de Humani Corporis Fabrica’ or ‘the Fabric of the Human Body’. He worked very closely with a famous artist Titian who drew 277 anatomical illustrations of Vesalius’ dissections. Because of this, Vesalius’ book showed the human body in greater detail than any other book had ever before. Due to the detail of his work and from the amount of people he dissected, he discovered that a few things Galen said about the anatomy of the human body were incorrect. Galen said there were holes through the septum of the heart to let blood through, Vesalius proved this was untrue. Galen said that the human jaw bone was made up of two parts – Which he thought because Galen only had access to animals for dissections, Galen assumed that humans had the same anatomy, but of course this was proved untrue by Vesalius’ findings – Vesalius showed this was also untrue. Proving that Galen was wrong in some things was very important for the progression of medicine, as it would cause doctors to question the rest of what Galen did.

Vesalius helped to establish surgery as a separate medical profession. In the beginning his work was criticised as many people in the medical profession refused to believe that Galen could have ever been wrong. But Vesalius’ book was very popular as it was so detailed and gradually gained acceptance throughout Europe.

Because of Vesalius, greater emphasis began to be placed upon the study of anatomy in general medical training.

William Harvey (1578-1657) was an English born doctor in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Studying at Padua, he later returned to England to be become a doctor at St. Bartholomew’s hospital in London and physician to James I and Charles I. In 1615 Harvey started to work on his idea that blood circulated around the body. He experimented on live animals – like lizards which were cold blooded, so he could cool them so they would bleed slowly when cut – and dissecting the cadavers of executed criminals. He carefully observed and measured all his findings and his theories were only backed up by the discovery of valves in the veins. He thought that the heart was a pump that pushed blood around the body through veins and arteries. The discovery of the valves proved his idea and enabled him to measure the amount of blood moved by each heart beat, and therefore how much blood there was in the body. Harvey also said that there must be tiny vessels that carry blood to every part of the body, but at the time there were no microscopes that could see something that small. Other doctors thought his ideas were eccentric, and he actually lost patients for publishing his findings. Harvey never got to see the impact of his findings on medicine. Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) proved Harvey’s ideas correct with the use of a more powerful microscope. But it was not until the 20th century that doctors fully realised the importance of Harvey’s work and methods such as checking a patients pulse became common.

Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) was a physician in London who fought as a captain in the English Civil War (1642-1645) on the side of the Parliamentarians (Round Heads). In later years he became known as the ‘English Hippocrates’.

He was given this title because of the importance he put on careful observation and the keeping of detailed case histories. In this way he built up a case history of every patient he had seen between 1661 and 1675, by comparing each patients symptoms, Sydenham wrote the book ‘Medical Observations’ and discovered a new disease called scarlet fever.

Sydenham’s work was very important as the symptoms of major diseases were recorded accurately to aid diagnosis. But as with many important figures in the Renaissance, his ideas were opposed by his contemporaries and it was not until long after his death that his work was accepted.

Factors that often prevented the works of these key figures from having any practical impact on the Renaissance were religion, government and the corresponding guilds.

The Religious organisation of the time – namely the church – had a lot of influence over what people thought. If an idea put forward by an individual conflicted with already established theories which supported Christian ideals, then the church would oppose the idea. They would often name it as blasphemy, and no ‘true Christian’ would disagree with what the church said, thus other physicians would also oppose the idea.

The governments and the guilds were closed linked with each other, as well as the church. Neither the government nor the guilds wanted to upset the church, which often had members in both. The government could fund an interesting idea, but often wouldn’t if the church didn’t like it. Likewise the guilds, such as the physicians’ guild and the surgeons’ guild would not publish any ideas they thought were against the church and against Galen’s work (which was supported by the church).

How far did new ideas and treatments affect the majority of the population?

These new ideas did not affect the majority of the population. Most physicians and surgeons knew about them, but very few paid them any heed because they did not conform with the accepted opinions on health. The handful of physicians and surgeons that were trying these new treatments could only be afforded by the rich. Treatments that were built upon many of these theories did not come into effect until roughly the 19th century.

Conclusion

The Renaissance was a time of many theoretical advances in medicine. Individuals such as Linacre, Paracelsus, Paré, Vesalius, Harvey and Sydenham made major steps forward in anatomy, surgery, theories on the causes of disease and infection, medical research methods and many more. The most positive change for the majority of the population was the improvements in public health, due largely to plague. However, there were many factors that prevented the theories being developed into usable treatments The conservatism of the church meant that new theories were held back from replacing the established methods. Despite there being very little practical advancements in treatments during the Renaissance, there was a great deal of theoretical progress which laid the foundations for medical developments in later centuries.