A Dummies Guide to Medicine in the Renaissance
What’s Renaissance and when was it?
Renaissance means re-birth. Its a period of time when lots of old ideas were challenged. When did it happen? Roughly the 14th to 17th centuries (AD).
What happened?
The churches power and authority were challenged! This might not seem to make much difference to medicine – but it did! Because the church had done most of the teaching about health, it had been hard to look for new ways of treating illnesses, or to explore the workings of the body. To do so could have been been seen as being anti-god (heresy). People who were thought of like that tended to get executed – so naturally people didn’t challenge the church often!
How did this affect medicine?
It meant that people were more willing to challenge the work of people like Galen, and also that they might be more willing to break some of the rules of the church. For example, dissection was still banned but now the authority of the church was questioned some anatomists were willing to take a risk and started dissecting. Results? Knowledge of the anatomy improved quite dramatically. Andreas Vesalius was able to produce a very detailed set of drawing of the human body and Wiliam Harvey discovered that blood circulated around the body: both were massive breakthroughs.
Massive breakthroughs? How did this help people at the time?
Heres the catch. People like Vesalius and Harvey made massive improvements to our knowledge about the way that the body worked and were able to spread their ideas quickly because of the printing press. However, neither of them knew what caused diseases so their findings were impressive but of little immediate use to doctors or patients. The area where there were breakthroughs that had an immediate and lasting effect on treatments was in the field of Surgery. Here a chance discovery in a battlefield hospital led to a massive improvement in the way that wounds were teated. A French surgeon, Pare, found that lotions he had concocted out of desperation, worked! He went on to gain a lot of support from the French monarchy and made several other breakthroughs – the use of ligatures, for example.
So, there were lots of new ideas – what about treatments?
Much the same as in earlier periods of time. Most people were still reliant on family members or trusted elders. There were an increasing number of trained doctors but they remained expensive. After the dissolution of the monasteries in the UK, there was also fewer places for the poor to go to receive help, though there were some more hospitals built. The doctors of King Charles II recorded the medicines they gave him in his dying days. They remained a combination of natural and supernatural attempts to tackle disease.
And Public Health, did that change?
Not particularly. There were some localised rules about waste and so on but in general investment was quite limited as other things remained more important to our rulers. The most significant chang in the UK came after the Great Plague and Fire of London. When the city was rebuilt, it was done so in a much more open and clean manner.
So did things get better during this period?
On a day to day basis for ordinary people with common ailments, probably not much. Scientists now had a lot more knowledge though, medicine was on the brink of being able to make massive leaps forward.
