Medicine+(Kamyar)

By: Kamyar Sadeghi
 * Renaissance Medicine**

In the beginning of the Renaissance period (fifteenth century) medicine still had the same ideas as the Middle Ages. Those ideas consisted of thoughts of a Greek physician named Galen who lived in the second century. Eventually though the word “Renaissance” came into its full meaning. This word means rebirth and not only with respect to medicine but also a lot of different aspects of life. During this time physicians and scholars began to get interested in the topic of human anatomy. People started challenging the church and were brave enough to do dissection, they started to question old ideas. From their research they corrected many very old errors which were now spread around the world through the printing press. Arabic pharmaceutical practices were studied and improved. Medicines like laudanum were developed to stop or reduce pain. Some doctors began to investigate the spread of infectious diseases. Surgical procedures were also modernized, mostly as the direct result of battlefield experiences. Surgeons began to experiment with ways to ease the suffering of their patients. Galen’s studies were very important because his ideas were accepted for centuries. He believed that the human body consisted of four kinds of fluids- blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm- which he called humors. He also said that when a person was sick their humors were out of balance. One way to revive a person to health was to restore the balance of their humors. A process called bleeding was used to do that. Bleeding involved making a cut in the arm of the patient and allowing a large amount of blood to flow out. Another way to heal a patient was to use herbal remedies, special diets, rest, and fasting (advising the patient to stop eating until they were better). Physicians, in accordance to Galen also believed that the positions of the planets in the sky affected a person’s health, therefore, when the signs were favorable the patient would recover. Galen’s ideas were not completely false, from dissecting animals he disproved an 400-year-old belief that the arteries carry blood not air. He described the structural difference between veins and arteries, but did not figure out that the blood circulates the body. His belief was that the liver is the central organ of the vascular system, and that blood moves from the liver to the periphery of the body to form flesh. Galen started the idea of checking a patient’s pulse. He also discovered that the mind was in the brain, not in the heart as Aristotle said. During the Renaissance Galen’s ideas were corrected and further developed. An anatomist who helped tremendously in this study was Andreas Vesalius he published many illustrations of his discoveries and is known as the founder of human anatomy. Vesalius worked at the university in Padua. He choose this center wisely since this university encouraged thinking and new ideas. Here he carried out dissections which were very dangerous, especially because Padua was close to the Pope. Andreas’s book “The Fabrication of the Human Body” is a book that will be remembered in Medicine forever. It contained highly skilled drawings of all parts of the human body and consisted of new suggestions on how to treat disease. It also corrected many mistakes made by Galen and others. Even though this book was very well written and was written by a very well known doctor people still decided to ignore Andreas Vesalius’s thoughts and still continued to believe Galen’s. William Harvey was another very important doctor of this time period. He figured out how the heart pumps blood around the body. He showed that blood flows around the body and arteries take blood from the heart and veins take it back. Galen thought that the liver replaced burnt blood and William Harvey corrected that idea and found out that blood is not burnt and that the heart circulates it around the body in order to make new blood. He also published two books called “An Atomical Study” which talked about how blood is pumped around the body in humans and animals and he wrote “Essays on the Generation of Animals” which is now considered the basis for modern embryology. Ambroise Pare was also very influential. He was a French surgeon who was the official royal surgeon for kings Henry the second, Francis the second, Charles the forth, and Henry the third. Pare was a leader in surgical techniques, especially the treatment of wounds. Ambroise became a military surgeon during the campaigns in Italy. He discovered a remedy against the pain of the wounded using firearms. He figured out that the roman turpentine remedy was more useful in healing wounds than boiling oil. Today medicine is one of the most important aspects of life. But before and during the middle ages people didn’t think that. There were hardly any people that were interested in it. One reason was because of the church‘s influence that made people focus mainly on God. Also, during this time ideas could not spread because of the plaque and because printing press had not been invented yet. So monks had to handwrite the only information that was available. In fact, the only ideas that were accepted during the middle ages were Galen‘s but his information was not always accurate. He corrected a lot of old beliefs but came up with new ideas that were sometimes wrong. However during the Renaissance new ideas started coming in from very different topics, including medicine. People started becoming interested in the human body and started to challenge the church. Therefore Galen’s ideas were corrected and recorded thanks to the printing press and the discoveries of different physicians. Out of all the doctors and scholars three figures really stood out. These were Ambroise Pare, William Harvey, and Andreas Vesalius. They can be considered the fathers of Medicine because even today their ideas are the foundation of medicine and they will always be remembered.

William Harvey and Andreas Vesalius are dissecting from: gcsehistory.wikispaces.com/Renaissance+medicine Sources consulted: library.thinkquest.org/15569/his-7.html, knowitall.org/kidswork/hospital/history/renaissance/index.html and Renaissance Grolier Volume six Outside resources: [], [] and [] Links to classmates: renaissance weapons by daniel, Renaissance Medicine and The Printing Press (Emily 6-2)