early modern medicine

• Treatments in the early modern period

  • Bleeding and purging
  • Religious: King's royal touch
  • Supernatural: magical charms
  • Herbal Remedies
  • Opium, tobacco, quinine
• Quacks were travelling salesmen who sold medicines
• Thomas Sydenham often advocated letting nature take its course
• King Charles II received 58 drugs when he was ill in 1685
• The College of Physicians suggested over 122 chemicals to treat 2140 illness
• There was partial progress with some natural treatments developing, but a large amount of continuity
• Similarities between the Black Death and the Great Plague of 1665

  • Beliefs about causes
  • Treatments
  • Social consequences
• Developments in the Great Plague of 1665 compared to the Black Death


  • Beliefs about causes
  • Quarantine measures
• Henry VIII changed the religion in England to Protestantism, seized the wealth of Catholic monasteries and closed them all down. He gave this money to start hospitals such as St Bartholomew's and St Thomas's in London. However, to start with, the total number of hospitals decreased
• It wasn't until the early 18th century that the idea of modern hospitals using modern methods to cure patients began. These new hospitals were founded and supported by the charitable gifts of private people e.g. banks and merchants (traders)
• These new hospitals also gave future doctors training and sometimes medical schools were attached to the hospitals. There were even wards for different types of disease
• Towards the end of the 18th century, hospitals also created dispensaries where the poor would be given medicine for free
• Types of specialist hospitals

  • Hospitals for the mentally ill
  • Hospitals for sexually transmitted diseases (venereal)
  • Maternity hospitals
  • Foundling Hospital
• Between 1720 and 1750, 5 new general hospitals were added to London and 9 more throughout the country. By 1800, 20,000 patients were handled a year (compared to under 5000 in 1400)
• John Hunter


  Very successful surgeon and anatomist
• John Hunter's methods


  1. Learned dissection in his brother's anatomy school

  2. Became an army surgeon

  3. Appointed Surgeon to King George III

  4. Experimented on himself

  5. Invented an operation to remove aneurysms

  6. Dissected human bodies and collected 3000 anatomical specimens

  7. Founded a surgical school and trained hundreds of surgeons
• John Hunter became a grave robber to get enough corpses to dissect, which shocked the public
• Edward Jenner


  Discovered vaccination against smallpox
• Jenner's discovery of vaccination

  1. Noticed that milkmaids with cowpox didn't get smallpox

  2. Inoculated a boy, James Phipps, with fluid from cowpox, then inoculated him with smallpox material and he was unaffected

  3. Called this process vaccination, after the Latin for cow, vacca
• There was lots of resistance to Jenner's discovery in the short term, including from inoculators who didn't want to lose their jobs and profits
• Deaths from smallpox fell quickly, but the government did not make vaccination compulsory until 1853, which was strictly enforced from 1871
• The World Health Organisation declared smallpox eradicated in 1980, and other scientists built on Jenner's work to develop vaccines against other diseases