The Medical Renaissance Period

History essay

Was the medical renaissance really a period of innovation and progress in medicine and health care?

Umang Sinha Myp4a

The medical renaissance was in 1400-1700. It was in a time period where the world had developed in many aspects. But was it the same principal with medicine though? After all, this was just after the medieval era where there was hardly or no development in medicine due to the dominance of old theories and powerful authorities. In the time, it was believed that the renaissance period would be the same as the medieval period. Their thought was that old theories were right and expected that no new theories would be introduced. Even if they would be introduced, they would be incorrect. However, there were medical

Andreas Vesalius, Ambroise Pare and William Harvey are three well known people for their improvement in medical knowledge. They made important scientific discoveries which changed people’s thoughts and also hold a lot of significance in the present time.

The medicine and health care in this time period was based on ancient theories by Galen and Hippocrates. This meant that the health care was based on the 4 humours theory of Galen. This is the theory that diseases are caused due to imbalance of the liquids in the body. This meant that bleeding patients and purging their bowels were very common. Superstitious thinking was very common as well since they wore charms to prevent diseases or to cure diseases. They explained diseases by looking at astrology and sins. This made them believe that diseases were caused due to the alignment of the planets and that god punished them for their sins. (Banham, Dawson, 70-71)

Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels in 1514. He was specialised in human anatomy as he was able to improve knowledge. He studied in the university of Louvain and then moved to Padua,

Ambroise Pare was a surgeon born in France 1510. He became a surgeon in Hotel Dieu in Paris and in 1536, he became an army surgeon. Most surgeons learnt a lot from experience in war and Pare was not an exception. In the time, a common method to seal wounds was cauterisation. This implied the use of boiling oil to the wound to stop the infection spreading any further. When the oil ran out, the wounded kept on coming and Pare had to use a method of his own. He quickly used an ointment of his own and this was very effective. He saw that the patient he tested this on, was feeling better and the others on which boiling oil was used, were lying in agony. This led to Pare making the decision of not using boiling oil since it only causes excruciating pain. It leads to wounds being swollen which leads to patients falling unconscious and sometimes even dying. Pare was not only able to help healing a wound, he was also able to help stopping the patient bleeding. The old treatment was to use red hot iron to seal the blood vessels and hence prevent the patient bleeding to death. Pare’s new and more sustainable idea was to tie a silk thread around the blood vessels. This would seal them and prevent the patient bleeding excessively. The threads were known as ligatures and they were very effective in doing their job. Although this went against the belief of most surgeons, Pare had to do this because, the pain caused by cauterising was