Post by Mr Modica on Sept 26, 2015 20:26:23 GMT
The word ‘renaissance’ means re-birth and the Renaissance period was one of a re-birth of ideas that saw some leaps forward in medicine. People started to ask questions about the medical treatments and theories they used and started to experiment with new ideas.
The period had lots of new inventions. The printing press allowed medical books to be produced and printed much cheaper and more accurately than if a monk was copying a book out. Artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci drew realistic drawings of the human body and had his drawings accompanied by medical explanations written by anatomists.
Vesalius worked on the anatomy of the human body. Human dissection was still banned by the Church so he stole bodies from graves, melted the flesh from the bones and had detailed drawings done of each bone. He showed that Galen was wrong in some of his theories and encouraged other doctors to question what they had been told was the truth, especially upsetting the church.
Pare invented new surgical methods to treat soldiers wounded at war. Before him, doctors had cauterised wounds with boiling oil, but one day on the battlefield, Pare ran out of oil and used an old Roman remedy of rose, egg and turpentine. The soldiers treated with the ointment healed much better than those who had boiling oil put in their wounds. Pare also invented ligatures (stitches) and used silk thread to tie off veins during amputations. He also invented a type of prosthetic limb. He wrote his book in French so ordinary people could read it. This was a more short-term solution to a problem than Harvey and Vesalius’ long term theories.
Harvey was an English doctor who made discoveries about blood. He worked out that the heart acted like a pump, that blood flowed in one direction around the body and that the human body contained a fixed amount of blood (it wasn’t being constantly burnt up and renewed as Galen had believed). He worked out his ideas by experimenting on both animals and humans. Because microscopes hadn’t been invented yet, he was criticised for coming up with the idea that there were tiny blood vessels in the body and so his ideas didn’t make much of an impact until later.
The three doctors came up with ideas and theories that questioned Galen and pushed medicine forward. They didn’t, however, find a way to cure the problems of the average people and the illnesses and diseases they were dying from, so the theories had little impact on the health of the overall population. The plague returned in 1665, this time called the Great Plague. It probably came from Holland on trade ships and hit London, Sunderland, Newcastle and Southampton. Over 70 000 people in London died, when there were around 400 000 people living there. In London, the Lord Mayor passed orders to deal with the plague such as: - sealing houses containing the plague, writing a red cross on the door and leaving the door locked for 40 days, even if some people in the house were healthy
- searchers were paid 10 p to decide if a person died from the plague
- funerals were no longer held in daylight and public entertainment was banned
- dogs and cats were killed
- fires were lit in the streets and rubbish cleaned up
The plague died out as the weather became very cold.
Make sure this is just the basis for your revision, using your class notes too!
www.springwoodgcsehistory.blogspot.co.uk/p/medicine-through-time-overview.html
The period had lots of new inventions. The printing press allowed medical books to be produced and printed much cheaper and more accurately than if a monk was copying a book out. Artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci drew realistic drawings of the human body and had his drawings accompanied by medical explanations written by anatomists.
Vesalius worked on the anatomy of the human body. Human dissection was still banned by the Church so he stole bodies from graves, melted the flesh from the bones and had detailed drawings done of each bone. He showed that Galen was wrong in some of his theories and encouraged other doctors to question what they had been told was the truth, especially upsetting the church.
Pare invented new surgical methods to treat soldiers wounded at war. Before him, doctors had cauterised wounds with boiling oil, but one day on the battlefield, Pare ran out of oil and used an old Roman remedy of rose, egg and turpentine. The soldiers treated with the ointment healed much better than those who had boiling oil put in their wounds. Pare also invented ligatures (stitches) and used silk thread to tie off veins during amputations. He also invented a type of prosthetic limb. He wrote his book in French so ordinary people could read it. This was a more short-term solution to a problem than Harvey and Vesalius’ long term theories.
Harvey was an English doctor who made discoveries about blood. He worked out that the heart acted like a pump, that blood flowed in one direction around the body and that the human body contained a fixed amount of blood (it wasn’t being constantly burnt up and renewed as Galen had believed). He worked out his ideas by experimenting on both animals and humans. Because microscopes hadn’t been invented yet, he was criticised for coming up with the idea that there were tiny blood vessels in the body and so his ideas didn’t make much of an impact until later.
The three doctors came up with ideas and theories that questioned Galen and pushed medicine forward. They didn’t, however, find a way to cure the problems of the average people and the illnesses and diseases they were dying from, so the theories had little impact on the health of the overall population. The plague returned in 1665, this time called the Great Plague. It probably came from Holland on trade ships and hit London, Sunderland, Newcastle and Southampton. Over 70 000 people in London died, when there were around 400 000 people living there. In London, the Lord Mayor passed orders to deal with the plague such as: - sealing houses containing the plague, writing a red cross on the door and leaving the door locked for 40 days, even if some people in the house were healthy
- searchers were paid 10 p to decide if a person died from the plague
- funerals were no longer held in daylight and public entertainment was banned
- dogs and cats were killed
- fires were lit in the streets and rubbish cleaned up
The plague died out as the weather became very cold.
Make sure this is just the basis for your revision, using your class notes too!
www.springwoodgcsehistory.blogspot.co.uk/p/medicine-through-time-overview.html