Medicine Through Time

Will contain everything you need to know for a grade 9 in History: Medicine in Britain

What was the effect of the Church in Medieval medicine (x4 details)?

The Roman Catholic Church was an extremely powerful organisation and seeked to control views on disease.

They encouraged people to view disease as a punishment from God. This hindered progress as people were encourages to just pray and repent instead of trying to find the real cause.

Scholars of Medicine were taught the works of Hippocrates and Galen, as this was in line with the Christian belief that God created human bodies and had to make them perfect.

Human dissection was banned so medieval Doctors could not discover correct ideas about Human anatomy but relied on Galen’s incorrect ideas which were based on animal dissection.

Supernatural beliefs for the causation of disease (x4 details)?

Disease was seen as a punishment from God because of people’s sins.

Disease could be caused by supernatural evil beings such as demons or witches - so people were tried and executed for this.

People believed that it could be caused by evil spirits living inside someone. So members of the Church would attempt to use chants to expel these spirits

In Astrology:

• People used the stars positions to diagnose diseases.

• This was a new way of diagnosing disease and was developed in Arabic medicine between 1100 to 1300.

• Medieval doctors carried a star calendar: an Almanac to help with their diagnosis.

• Different star signs were thought to affect different parts of the body

Rational theories for the cause of disease in Medieval England (x2 ideas):

The Four humours:

• Idea created by Hippocrates in ancient Greece: It claimed that the body had 4 fluids (or humours): blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. An imbalance caused disease.

• It was developed by Galen in ancient Rome: He suggested that this imbalance could be treated with food which had it’s own humour e.g. someone with a cold with too much cold, wet phlegm could be given something dry and hot such as pepper.

Miasma Theory:

• This was the belief that bad smelling air caused disease.

• It could be caused by anything: from dead bodies to human waste.

• The idea originated from ancient Rome and Greece.

• Even Galen acknowledged it

• It remained influential until the 1860s, when it was disproved by German Theory

Influence of Hippocrates & Galen (x4 points)

• They wrote their beliefs about medicine down in books. That were translated into Latin by the Catholic Church.

• The Catholic Church taught it as the absolute truth so it could not be challenged

• Many of the ideas were taught for centuries and the incorrect ideas continued and since the ideas were based on animal dissection and Human dissection was banned the ideas could not be challenged.

• Some of their ideas are still used today such as the Hippocratic Oath. The idea that the doctor should observe the patient when diagnosing is also still used today.