prevention

• medieval

  • Processions through towns to pray for forgiveness
  • Whipping themselves
  • Drink wine/vinegar
  • Drink urine once a day
  • Bathe in urine 3 times
  • Bloodletting
  • killing cats and dogs
  • Keep clean
  • Stay away from infected people.
• medieval

  The theory of the four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile) dominated medical thinking: introduced by hippocrates. 
• medieval

  1349 - King Edward III ordered the filth to be cleaned from the streets of london.
• medieval

  CHANGE: incorrect ideas about the 4 humours, which led to prevention methods such as bloodletting, which doesn’t actually do anything. Most prevention methods were wrong except keeping clean and staying away from infected people. But King Edward ordered to clean the filth, which was spreading The Black Death, so it successfully prevented TBD to an extent.
• early modern

  Alchemy:

  • ‘Elixir of life’ → to keep you young forever
  • Antimony - when added to medicines, it would make the person violently sick because it was poison.
  • John Dee → advisor to queen elizabeth I + famous mathematician and astronomer. He thought that the ‘dark arts’, magic and medicine would prevent illness. 
• early modern

  Soothsayers: were supposed to have powers of prophecy. Often had a basket with plants and herbs, special stones. The stones were used to make bracelets which they would sell as protection from evil. 

  • Usually a ‘wise woman’ /old woman

  Mother Shipton: predicted events in england. Had the only well in England - thought to have high mineral content. Drinking or bathing in it was said to keep you fit and healthy.
• early modern

  Diet and exercise: Promoted for maintaining good health.
• early modern

  CHANGE: some change, people now started to gain some medical knowledge so they started to believe that medicine would work. Diet and exercise was promoted. Use of chemicals and unknown elements such as antimony. 

  CONTINUITY: they still believed in the 4 humours, a soothsayer’s special bracelets would not give you protection, but they believed it because they feared the supernatural. 
• modern: 18 + 19

  • Alexander Gordon [1795] — saved mothers during childbirth by getting medical practitioners to frequently wash their hands and clothes. His method wasn’t effective in the early 1800s, but fewer people died due to a reduction in the risk of infection spreading from surgeons.  
  • James Lind [1753] — said that sailors should have doses of lime juice and fresh fruit to reduce scurvy. 
• modern: 18 + 19

  JOHN SNOW: 1854

  • Discovered that contaminated water from rivers [contaminated by sewage and waste thrown into rivers by factories] caused cholera. 
  • The fact that beer drinkers didn’t get cholera [because they didn’t drink the contaminated water] supported his claim. 
• modern: 18+19

  JOHN SNOW: 1854

  • He decided to draw a map of each house on Broad Street and list the number of cholera cases in each house. 
  • This scientific approach of observing showed that more people had contracted cholera around a specific water pump on Broad Street.
  • He therefore decided to pull the pump out to disallow people to get water from there, and noticed that the cholera cases had decreased. 
• modern: 18+19

  Pasteur and Koch:

  Pasteur [1861] —> created the germ theory and discovered bacteria. 

  Koch → specified which bacteria caused which infection, to create vaccines for each disease, and also discovered that antibodies help destroy bacteria and build up immunity against the disease. 
• modern: 18+19

  SMALLPOX:

  • Smallpox killed about 30% of the infected and the survivors we left disfigured. 
  • Inoculation - deliberately infected themselves with weakened smallpox, but this could give them the actual disease. 
  • The vaccine was made compulsory in 1852, but parents were fined for not having their children vaccinated in 1871. 
• modern: 18+19

  1796: EDWARD JENNER

  • Noticed something → local milkmaids never got smallpox, but got cowpox, a much milder disease. 
  • Investigated his theory that cowpox infection prevented smallpox
  • Tested on James Phipps, 8 years old, by injecting some of the pus from milkmaids with cowpox into him. 
  • Phipps was ill for around a week, then became better and was perfectly well. 
• modern: 18+19

  1796: EDWARD JENNER

  • In order to prove that the boy was immune to smallpox, he was inoculated with smallpox pus but no disease followed. 
  • Several months later, phipps was again inoculated with smallpox pus, but still didn’t get it. 
  • This proves that he became IMMUNE to smallpox through his vaccination. 
• modern: 18+19

  CHANGE: significant change. the introduction of the vaccine changed lives and saved millions as it eventually eradicated smallpox in the 1970s. Scientists began to apply science, by observing, experimenting and forming theories to test out. This curiosity has saved many lives, due to the work of John Snow + Edward Jenner. 
• modern: 20

  Other vaccines developed:

  • Polio - 1995
  • Measles - 1963
  • MMR - 1988
  • Hepatitis B - 1994
• modern: 20

  Dr. Andrew Wakefield:

  • Made an ‘observation’ that there was a ‘clear’ link between the MMR vaccine and autism in children. 
  • This was wrong because he conducted the experiment within a small sample, which could just be a coincidence. 
  • As a result, many parents refused to give their children the MMR vaccine, and therefore, their children were more likely to suffer with measles, mumps or rubella. 
• modern: 20

  dr. andrew wakefield

  • The percentage of vaccinated people fell lower than 95% and started an anti-vax movement. 
  • Anti-Vaccination League. 
  • Wakefield did nothing useful, his observation didn’t have enough evidence to back it up, and the sample was too small to make a ‘clear’ link. He limited progress.