medieval treatments

• Supernatural


  Theories and treatments that are beyond nature, often spiritual or religious and rely on an element of faith
• Natural


  Theories and treatments based upon what can be observed in the real world, often more scientific but not always correct
• Supernatural treatments


  • Prayer
  • Confessing sins
  • Pilgrimage
• Prayer


  Usually done through the priest, praying to a particular saint for salvation
• Confessing sins


  Done to try and gain God's forgiveness and therefore the removal of the illness
• Pilgrimage


  The sick might embark on a difficult religious journey to the shrine of a saint particularly one associated with the disease
• Natural treatments


  • Physicians
  • Apothecaries
  • Quacks
  • Barber surgeons
  • Home remedies
• Physicians


  The most expensive, would normally aim to use Hippocratic ideas to diagnose and treat the patient, often by balancing the humors
• Apothecaries


  Mixed up medicines, might produce medicines on the instructions of a physician or create their own
• Quacks


  Traveling medicine salespeople, at best offered similar medicines to the Apothecary, more often promoted fraudulent panaceas
• Barber surgeons


  Semi-trained to provide basic external surgery including tooth pulling, lancing boils and removing growths
• Home remedies


  Herbal and other remedies learned and used by women in the home, local wise women and midwives might provide more specialist treatments
• Hospitals in the medieval period were places of care rather than cure, the focus was on comfort and hygiene
• By 1500 there were 1,500 hospitals across the country
• Leper hospitals


  Ran by the church, often by monks and nuns, leprosy was seen as a result of sin so sufferers were seen as unclean
• Medieval understanding of the cause of disease divided between the supernatural and the natural, and the treatments followed the same logic