Disease and the Supernatural

• Disease and the Supernatural

  In medieval England, treatment of disease was poor. The key problem was a lack of understanding of the causes of disease. Many people believed that disease was caused by evil spirits or supernatural beings
• Supernatural Causes


  Beliefs about the causes of disease
• Supernatural causes of disease

  • Punishment from God for people's sins
  • Evil supernatural beings like demons or witches
  • Evil spirits living inside someone
• Curing disease with supernatural causes

  1. Prayer

  2. Repentance

  3. Exorcisms using chants to remove evil spirits
• Many people were tried as witches and executed for being believed to be behind outbreaks of disease
• The Church


  The Roman Catholic Church, an extremely powerful organisation in medieval Europe that dominated the way people studied and thought about a range of topics, including medicine
• The Church encouraged people to believe that disease was a punishment from God


  This prevented people from trying to find cures for disease
• If disease was a punishment from God, all you could do was pray and repent
• The Church made sure that scholars of medicine learned the works of Galen as his ideas fit the Christian belief that God created human bodies and made them to be perfect
• The Church stopped anyone from disagreeing with Galen
• The Church outlawed dissection
• This meant that medieval doctors couldn't discover ideas about human anatomy for themselves - they instead had to learn Galen's incorrect ideas
• Comment and Analysis - The Church had a big Influence on medieval medicine

  The Church's influence over medieval medicine meant that there was very little change in ideas about the cause of disease until the Renaissance - the Church and its messages were so influential that people were unable to question them
• Astrology


  The idea that the movements of the planets and stars have an effect on the Earth and on people
• Astrology


  • Used to diagnose disease
  • Developed in Islamic medicine
  • Brought to Europe between 1100 and 1300
• Using astrology to diagnose disease

  1. Doctor owns an almanac with information about where planets and stars are

  2. Doctor uses this information to predict how patients' health could be affected
• Parts of the body affected by different star signs

  • Different parts of the body