TREATMENT: change+continuity

• Humoural imbalances


  Belief that persisted through to the end of the 17th century and beyond
• Old treatments


  1. Bleeding

  2. Purging

  3. Sweating
• Transference


  Belief that an illness or disease could be transferred to something else
• Transference


  • Rubbing an object on an ailment to transfer the disease
  • Rubbing warts with an onion to transfer them to the vegetable
• Some physicians believed that within each country were herbal remedies which would cure the diseases that came from that country
• New remedies


  • Sarsaparilla from the New World to treat the Great Pox
  • Ipecacuanha from Brazil, effective as a cure for dysentery
• Cinchona bark


  Effective remedy for malaria as long as patients continued to take it for some time after it seemed as though the disease had gone
• New arrivals tested by physicians

  • Tea
  • Coffee
  • Nutmeg
  • Cinnamon
  • Tobacco
• New World


  North and South America, Europeans only aware of their existence from 1492
• Dysentery


  A stomach bug that causes severe diarrhoea
• Alchemy


  Laid the foundations for the modern science of chemistry
• Iatrochemistry


  Medical chemistry, extremely popular in the 17th century
• Paracelsus


  • Scientist who experimented with chemical treatments
• Remedies in the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis

  • Salts
  • Metals
  • Minerals
• Antimony


  In small doses promotes sweating, in larger doses encourages vomiting
• Antimony potassium tartrate was said to have cured Louis XIV of France of typhoid fever in 1657, and became wildly popular afterwards