Medieval medicine of Western Europe

[3] The Hippocratic Corpus, popularly attributed to an Ancient Greek medical practitioner known as Hippocrates, lays out the basic approach to health care.

Ancient Greek philosophers viewed the human body as a system that reflects the workings of nature and Hippocrates applied this belief to medicine.

In Homer's epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, the Greek gods are implicated as the cause of plagues or widespread disease and that those maladies could be cured by praying to them.

The religious side of Greek medical practice is clearly manifested in the cult of Asclepius, whom Homer regarded as a great physician and who was deified in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE.

Afterwards the visitor to the temple bathed, offered prayers and sacrifice, and received other forms of treatment like medication, dietary restrictions, and an exercise regiment, in keeping with the Hippocratic tradition.

[13] Her understanding of the plant based medicines informed her commentary on the humors of the body and the remedies she described in her medical text Causae et curae were influenced by her familiarity with folk treatments of disease.

[14] The classical idea of the physician as a selfless servant who had to endure unpleasant tasks and provide necessary, often painful treatment was of great influence on early Christian practitioners.

The monks and nuns reorganized older texts so that they could be utilized more efficiently, adding a table of contents for example to help find information quickly.

Foreign herbs and plants determined to be highly valuable were grown in gardens in close proximity to the monastery in order for the monastic clergy to hastily have access to the natural remedies.

In the early Medieval period, hospitals, poor houses, hostels, and orphanages began to spread from the Middle East, each with the intention of helping those most in need.

The cities of Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Antioch contained some of the earliest and most complex hospitals, with many beds to house patients and staff physicians with emerging specialties.

Some of the wounds that were allowed to be performed on were external injuries, such as skin lacerations caused by a sharp edge, such as by a sword, dagger and axe or through household tools such as knives.

Between 1250 and 1265 Theodoric Borgognoni produced a systematic four volume treatise on surgery, the Cyrurgia, which promoted important innovations as well as early forms of antiseptic practice in the treatment of injury, and surgical anaesthesia using a mixture of opiates and herbs.

For example, the Benedictine abbess and healer, Hildegard of Bingen, claimed that black bile and other humour imbalances were directly caused by presence of the Devil and by sin.

[46] Another example of the fusion of different medicinal theories is the combination of Christian and pre-Christian ideas about elf-shot (elf- or fairy-caused diseases) and their appropriate treatments.

An early medieval treatise in the West on plants known as the Ex herbis femininis was largely based on Dioscorides Greek text: De material medica.

The Ex herbis was a lot more popular during this time because it was not only easier to read, but contained plants and their remedies that related to the regions of southern Europe, where botany was being studied.

“Italian humanists in the fifteenth century had recovered and translated ancient Greek botanical texts which had been unknown in the West in the Middle Ages or relatively ignored”.

[51] Soon after the rise in interest in botany, universities such as Padua and Bologna started to create programs and fields of study; some of these practices including setting up gardens so that students were able to collect and examine plants.

In sixteenth century medicine, botany was rapidly becoming a lively and fast-moving discipline that held wide universal appeal in the world of doctors, philosophers, and pharmacists.

The ultimate healer in this interpretation is of course God, but medical practitioners cited both the Bible and Christian history as evidence that humans could and should attempt to cure diseases.

[61] Though the widespread Christian tradition of sickness being a divine intervention in reaction to sin was popularly believed throughout the Middle Ages, it did not rule out natural causes.

These texts were progressively modified from one copy to the next, with notes and drawings added into the margins as the monks learned new things and experimented with the remedies and plants that the books supplied.

Medicine was not a formal area of study in the early medieval era, but it grew in response to the proliferation of translated Greek and Arabic medical texts in the 11th century.

[70][71] The founding of the Universities of Bologna (1088), Paris (1150), Oxford (1167), Montpellier (1181), Padua (1222) and Lleida (1297) extended the initial work of Salerno across Europe, and by the 13th century, medical leadership had passed to these newer institutions.

Academic medicine also focused on actual medical practice where students would study individual cases and observe the professor visiting patients.

He traced all of this hospital movement to Pope Innocent III, and though he was least papistically inclined, Virchow did not hesitate to give extremely high praise to this pontiff for all that he had accomplished for the benefit of children and suffering mankind.

This hospitium eventually developed into what we now understand as a hospital, with various monks and lay helpers providing the medical care for sick pilgrims and victims of the numerous plagues and chronic diseases that afflicted Medieval Western Europe.

Benjamin Gordon supports the theory that the hospital – as we know it – is a French invention, but that it was originally developed for isolating lepers and plague victims, and only later undergoing modification to serve the pilgrim.

Starting in Asia, the Black Death reached Mediterranean and western Europe in 1348 (possibly from Italian merchants fleeing fighting in Crimea), and killed 25 million Europeans in six years, approximately 1/3 of the total population and up to a 2/3 level in the worst-affected urban areas.