Medicine In The Elizabethan Era

Imagine having to have leeches all over your body to cure a sickness, or having to look out your window and see dead bodies everywhere. This is highly unusual to happen nowadays since we have better medicine and doctors. However, people in the Elizabethan Era weren’t so fortunate. They depended on local doctors and herbs to help them survive any type of disease or illness. Theses two things however did little to help 25 million people survive the most notorious disease to ever hit the middle ages, the black death.

Medicine in the Elizabethan Era was very basic, simply because they had very little knowledge to expand their medical information. The Black Plague caused one to have buboes all over the body, they way doctors would treat them was

The type of medical practice you would receive depended on your wealth and if you could afford a treatment or not. The treatments were expensive because there were limited doctors since not everyone could attend college. Most medical practices were based off the four humours or bodily fluids. They were the blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile). They would administer practices if one would outbalance the other since it is believed that in order to be healthy they all had to be equal balance. The most basic medical practice was discovered during this time. Ambroise Pare was treating a gunshot wound and when he ran out of oil he began to cleaning the injury with water. He discovered that water helped the wound heal better than with oil. He realized that hygiene played a huge role in healing and from that day forward physicians began using water to treat wounds instead of oil (Alchen,

There were three very well known diseases in this era. One of them was the Bubonic Plague or commonly referred as the Black Death/Plague. The Black death killed nearly 25 million people. It began when ships were coming back from trade. Rats carrying infected fleas climbed on board and when the ships entered the dock they climbed off and spreaded all throughout european towns. Within the first to seven days, one would experience headaches, nausea, and fever. This deadly disease had such a speedy mortality rate it completely took small european towns by storm. The second most well known disease was Typhus. Typhus is a disease where bacteria is transferred to humans by carriers such like fleas or lice that picked up the disease by other animals like rats, cats, and racoons. This disease was a huge problem to prisoners since they had very poor living conditions. They were crowded and lacked in bathing which would give them body lice. Most prisoners would die before they even served their full sentence. The third one was Anemia. A disease that today is as common as arthritis, tuberculosis, and rheumatism. It was a condition in which the blood does not have enough healthy red blood cells (Alchen,