Everything on the GCSE History Medieval Medicine: Ideas About Disease and Treatment poster is written out below, section by section. Use it to search the sheet, copy parts into your own notes, or check a fact quickly.
Medicine barely changed for 500 years
Medieval doctors leaned on ancient Greek and Roman ideas and changed them very little for around 500 years, because people trusted old authorities and the Church far more than new investigation.
Where the ideas came from
Two ancient doctors set the rules that medieval medicine still followed a thousand years later.
- Hippocrates, a Greek doctor (c460-370 BC), taught doctors to observe patients closely and blamed illness on the four humours: the idea that the body holds four fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) that have to stay in balance.
- Galen, a Roman doctor (c129-216 AD), added the Theory of Opposites, treating an imbalance with its opposite, such as something warming for a cold illness. He described the body from dissecting animals, so parts of his anatomy were simply wrong.
- Doctors were expected to agree with Galen rather than test him, which is a main reason medical ideas stood still for so long.
What people thought caused disease
Natural and supernatural explanations sat side by side, and most people accepted both at the same time.
The four humours
Illness came from having too much or too little of one fluid. A fever, for example, was blamed on an excess of blood. The four humours were blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.
Miasma
Bad or smelly air from rotting waste and dirt was thought to carry disease.
God's punishment
Many believed illness was sent for sin, so the answer was prayer and repentance.
Astrology
Physicians checked the position of the planets, since the stars were thought to affect the body and the humours.
How they treated and diagnosed it
- Treatments aimed to rebalance the humours or to win God's forgiveness, and most did nothing for the real illness.
- Bloodletting (opening a vein or using leeches) and purging (laxatives to empty the bowels) were the commonest, meant to drain an excess humour.
- Herbal remedies were mixed by apothecaries and by wise women, and a few, such as willow bark for pain, genuinely worked.
- Prayer, confession and pilgrimage to a shrine were used for illnesses seen as God's will.
- To diagnose, a physician studied the colour of a patient's urine against a chart and used zodiac charts to choose the right moment to treat.
- Care ranged from university-trained physicians for the rich down to barber-surgeons, apothecaries and wise women for everyone else.
The Church kept ideas still
- The Christian Church controlled learning, and it both preserved medieval medicine and held it back.
- Monks copied and saved the works of Galen and Hippocrates, so the texts survived, and the Church ran hospitals that gave the sick rest, food and care rather than cures.
- But the Church taught Galen as fixed truth, partly because his ideas fitted belief in the soul, and it discouraged anyone who questioned him.
- Human dissection was heavily restricted, so doctors could not correct Galen's mistakes, and medicine stayed still until the Renaissance.