What medical advances were made during the Renaissance?
Renaissance medicine was based on a more rigorously scientific approach than had previously been the case. In this great age of discovery, more time was devoted to medical research, which then formed the basis of revolutionary new developments in medical practice and the treatment of illnesses.
The biggest single factor in the development of Renaissance medicine was the growth in anatomical knowledge. For centuries, knowledge of the human body was limited, due largely to the Church's strictures against the use of cadavers. Orthodox Christian teaching held that, when we die, we must be buried whole. Only in this way would the whole person be resurrected to face God on the Day of Judgement.
But during the Renaissance, legal and cultural restrictions on dissecting cadavers gradually eased, thus opening up the study of human anatomy. Once doctors were able to examine the human body in depth, they were able to dispense...
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with some of the more outmoded and superstitious practices that had been prevalent in the study of medicine during the Middle Ages.
For instance, it had previously been believed that much illness was caused by an imbalance in the body's humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—and that, in order to rebalance them, it was sometimes necessary to carry out bloodletting. With the greater knowledge of the human anatomy and how it works, Renaissance medicine was able to show that far from curing diseases, bloodletting actually made them worse.
What were the advancements in medicine during the Renaissance period?
The Renaissance began in Europe in the 1400s and this cultural rebirth had many important ramifications on the study of medicine.
Here are some key developments:
- Pharmacists (also called apothecaries) began inventing new medicines with herbs brought back from the Americas by European explorers.
- In 1628, William Harvey discovered that blood is pumped around the body by the heart.
- Vesalius was the first physician to make anatomically-correct drawings of athe body. This is because he dissected corpses and drew exactly what he found.
- The French surgeon, Ambroise Pare, found an alternative to the painful process of cauterising a wound after surgery. Instead, Pare used a more effective treatment made from turpentine, egg yolk and rose oil.
- Swiss physician, Paracelsus, wrote the first book on occupational health which was called 'On the Miners' Sickness' and was published in 1567.
- Girolamo Fracastoro coined the term 'syphilis' and proposed the theory that contagious diseases spread from person to person by tiny 'disease seeds' or spores.