YEAR 11 MEDICINE REVISION

1
YEAR 11MEDICINE REVISION

• 1350 - 1900

2
MEDIEVAL 1350 - 1500

• Dominated by RELIGION (The Church), SUPERSTITION
  and TRADITION (including HERBAL CURES ANCIENT
  IDEAS from Greeks Romans especially GALEN
  (Theory of the Four Humours)).
• Short Life Expectancy 35, varied according to
  wealth, gender, location (town or village).
• Poor diet pottage recurrent famine.
• Low level of public hygiene.
• Limited knowledge of anatomy.
• Black Death (1348) lowest point in the history
  of medicine (1 in 3 died in England) medicine
  incapable of stopping this medical disaster.
• Doctors priests, monks nuns apothecaries
  barber-surgeons wise women all worked as
  healers.
• Some hospitals medical schools (part of
  universities) run by the Church limited in
  what they could do or teach.

3
MEDICAL RENAISSANCE 1500 - 1750

• Renaissance rebirth, i.e. new start for
  medicine part of wider changes in Europe old
  ideas being questioned, but not overturned
  immediately.
• Vesalius, Paré, Harvey extended knowledge,
  (medicine would be based on science in future,
  not tradition) but did not change practice
  doctors stuck to traditional cures for the time
  being.
• Conditions essentially the same as medieval (life
  expectancy unhygienic conditions diet), but
  women pushed to the margins (wise women denounced
  as witches).

4
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 1750 - 1900

• Advances in science (Hunter Jenner Snow) and
  technology (microscopes, X-rays) had major impact
  on medical knowledge and began to gradually
  influence medical practice.
• GERM THEORY (LOUIS PASTEUR) 1861 led to new
  science of bacteriology. (Idea of bad air
  (miasma) as cause of illness faded away.)
• Life expectancy (45 by1900) began to climb for
  some, but dreadful conditions in new industrial
  towns kept it low for many big killer diseases
  TUBERCULOSIS (TB) CHOLERA.
• New large hospitals with properly trained staff
  maintaining hygienic conditions (Nightingale,
  1860).
• Apothecaries replaced gradually by Chemists
  (Boots), but old unscientific preparations
  continued to be made up.
• Women begin to gain a place in modern medicine
  Nightingale (nurses), Garrett-Anderson (doctors).

5
Why was medicine more effective in c.1900 than it
was in c.1350? (12 marks)

• During the Middle Ages and Renaissance the Church
  ran the universities which included medical
  schools.
• Louis Pasteur published his findings on germs in
  1861.
• X-rays were discovered in 1895.