medicine 1

• What did people think caused illness?

  Punishment from God; misalignment of stars/planets; unbalanced humours; miasma
• What were the four humours?

  Blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler (yellow bile)
• Who came up with the Theory of the Four Humours?

  Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physician
• Who wrote more than 350 books about it?

  Galen
• What was miasma?

  Bad air
• What was an influential institution controlling medical learning?

  The Church
• What was illegal in medical learning?

  Dissections
• What was invented in 1440?

  The printing press
• Who criticised the theory of four humours but continued to practise medicine the old way?

  Henri de Mondeville
• What religious treatments existed?

  Prayers, fasting, pilgrimages, the king’s touch
• What supernatural treatments existed?

  Incantations, charms/amulets, astrology
• What humoural treatments existed?

  Blood-letting and purging
• What were remedies?

  Herbal infusions to drink, sniff or bathe in
• What was a common remedy?

  Theriaca
• Name two famous herbal instruction manuals.

  Materia Medica; Circa Instans
• How was illness and disease prevented?

  Religious faith; hygiene (regimens sanitatis); diet; purifying the air
• How long was a medical degree?

  7 - 10 years
• What did physicians do?

  Diagnose illness and recommend a treatment, by looking at a urine sample and consulting the astrological charts
• How many hospitals were there by 1500?

  1,100 hospitals
• What did hospitals do?

  Offered hospitality - not treatment
• Where were most sick people cared for?

  At home, by women
• What was the Black Death and when did it arrive?

  Outbreak of deadly bubonic plague - arrived 1348
• What was the best way to prevent the Black Death?

  Escaping!