Medieval Britain 1066–1509, Year 11: medieval medicine, hospitals and surgery (Health and the people option)

yellow bile; black bile

提示Two fluids of the same kind, told apart by colour.

为什么The idea came from the ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates and was developed by Galen, a Greek doctor working in Rome. Each humour was linked to a season and to qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry.

The humours being out of balance

提示Health meant having the right amount of each.

为什么Treatment therefore aimed to put things right, for example by bleeding a patient thought to have too much blood, or by purging with something to make them vomit.

Family members and local wise women or healers

提示Close to home.

为什么Care was mostly given in the household and the village, using herbal remedies handed down by word of mouth. Apothecaries sold medicines, and barber-surgeons did operations such as bloodletting. The university-trained physician treated the rich.

Miasma

提示From a Greek word for pollution.

为什么It lasted from ancient times into the second half of the 19th century. It led people to clean up filth and carry sweet-smelling herbs, which sometimes helped for the wrong reason.

The Church supported them

提示The same body controlled the universities where physicians were trained.

为什么Training meant studying the ancient texts and accepting them, not testing them. With the Church behind his work, to challenge Galen could look like challenging the Church itself.

Urine

提示It was held up to the light in a glass flask.

为什么Physicians compared it against a chart. They also checked the position of the stars and planets, since astrology was thought to affect the body. Only the rich could afford a university-trained physician.

To care for the sick, not to cure them

提示They were usually run by monks and nuns.

为什么The Church ran hundreds of them. They offered rest, food and, above all, prayer: care of the soul came first. Trying to cure an illness could even seem to challenge God's will.

Monks copied out ancient medical texts by hand

提示Before printing, a book survived only if someone wrote it out again.

为什么This kept the ideas of Hippocrates and Galen alive. It also meant that the same ideas, right and wrong, were handed down unchanged for centuries.

Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

提示Europeans knew him by a Latin form of his name beginning with A.

为什么Completed around 1025, it gathered the medical knowledge of the Greek and Islamic worlds into one vast work. It was translated into Latin and remained a standard textbook in Europe's universities for centuries.

Al-Razi (Rhazes)

提示He also wrote a book called 'Doubts about Galen'.

为什么He stressed careful observation of patients and was willing to question the ancient authorities. He ran a large hospital in Baghdad where doctors were trained.

Scholars in the Islamic world translated them into Arabic and preserved them

提示Think of Baghdad's House of Wisdom.

为什么Later the texts were translated from Arabic into Latin, in places such as Toledo in Spain, and so came back into western Europe along with the discoveries of Islamic doctors.

Barber-surgeons

提示They also cut hair.

为什么They learned by apprenticeship, not at university, and were looked down on by physicians. Much of their experience came from treating wounds in war.

Cauterisation

提示In the 16th century Paré replaced it with tied threads.

为什么It sealed the blood vessels but was agonising and damaged the flesh around the wound. Bleeding was one of the three great problems of surgery, along with pain and infection.

Wine

提示An everyday drink that happens to kill some germs.

为什么They also argued that pus was not a healthy sign, against the accepted teaching of Galen. Their ideas were not widely taken up.

Natural drugs from plants, such as opium and hemlock

提示Herbal potions; too strong a dose could kill.

为什么Because the dose was so hard to judge, operations had to be fast and simple. Surgeons could set bones, remove arrowheads and cut off limbs, but they could not safely operate deep inside the body.

Albucasis (Al-Zahrawi)

提示Sometimes called the father of surgery.

为什么His book, 'Al-Tasrif', was translated into Latin and used by European surgeons for about five hundred years. He described ligatures for tying blood vessels long before Paré.