Medicine in the Elizabethan Era

Medicine In the Elizabethan Era

The illnesses in the Elizabthan era and their cures

• Bubonic Plague: treated by lancing the buboes and applying a warm poultice of butter, onion, and garlic. Other remedies: Tobacco, arsenic, lily root, and dried toad.
• Head Pains: Treated with sweet-smelling herbs suck as rose, lavendar, sage, and bay.
• Stomach Pains: Treated with wormwood, mint, and balm.
• Lung Problems: Treated with liquorice and comfrey.
• Wounds: Vinegar was utilized as a cleansing agent and believed it would kill disease.
• Earache: Put a roasted onion in ear.
• Heart Problems: Remedied by plants e.g. saffron, basil and rosemary.
• Stye: Rub their eye with the tail of a black tomcat.
• Leeches were thought good for purifying the blood if a person was sick.
• The cause of many Elizabethan illnesses was the lack of sanitation. There were open sewers in the streets which were also filled with garbage!
• The most deadly diseases in this era were not cured but simply subsided
• Remedies in this era were mostly just a concoction of a bunch of herbs thought to have medicinal value.
• Medicine was mostly based off of the beliefs in the medieval times
• Since the body's function was not truly understood, the herbal medicine could sometimes be worse than the actual illness as they sometimes included poisons, urine, or excrement.
• Cures were just a concoction of a bunch of herbs that were thought to have medicinal value.

Medical Advances

As primitive as their medicine was, there were some medical advances in this era

• Jean-Baptiste Denis used the new technique of blood transfusion to the treatment of mental patients.
• Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first to see germs and sperm cells under a microscope.
• The first effective remedy for malaria was a plant derived from Peru called Cinchona.
• Ambroise Pare, an army physician, discovered the effectiveness of hygiene on wound healing. One night after treating many gunshot wounds with boiling oil, he ran out of oil. Many soldiers' wounds were uncared for so Pare simply cleaned and dressed their wounds treated with oil were feverish and in pain, while the ones cleaned and dressed were sleeping and doing well.
• French bacteriologist, Paul-Louis Simond, discovered that plague was a rodent disease.

Elizabethan Physicians

• Wore long dark robes with pointed hoods, leather gloves, boots, and bizarre masks that were filled with begamot oil. They wore amulets filled with dried blood and dried toads around their waist. They doused themselves in vinegar and chewed angelica before approaching a victim.
• Only accessible to the wealthy. The usual fee would be 1 gold coin worth 10 shillings. This fee was well beyond what most people had back then.
• Believed that certain gemstones held medicinal powers. Garnets were believed to keep sorrow at bay. Topaz and jacinth were used to alleviate anger. Emeralds and sapphires were thoguht to ease the wind.
• Based their philosophies on the teachings of Aristotle and Hippocrates. These beliefs were widely accepted during the Elizabethan era.

Other Medical Practitioners

• Most people went to the apothecary where they could get drugs for their illnesses. They also sold sweets, cosmetics, and perfumes.
• Elizabethan barbers and surgeons worked together and were inferior to the physicians in that era. The surgeons performed surgery while the barbers were only allowed to pull teeth and let blood.
• The local "Wise Woman" supposedly knew lots of cures from herbs and was often the first contacted by the poor. The Church also offered comfort to the poor ill.
• Other medical practitioners included folk healers, monks, and even saints. Women often practiced as healers, though later their role was prohibited.

Blood Circulation

• William Harvey: Discovered that squeezing, or contracting, not dilating, is the heart's most important movement.
• Showed that , though the atria contract before the ventricles. (The right and left atria contract together. So do the right and left ventricles).
• It wasn't until the end of the century that scientists built on his ideas to make discoveries, Moreover, it took a long time for Harvey's ideas to change to medicine
• Most scientists ignored William Harvey's ideas about blood circulation. It took 20 or 30 years before Harvey's discoveries became well known

Surgery and Anatomy

• Anatomy was the most hopeful branch of medical science in this period of time.
• Physician, William Harvey, demonstrated, for the first time, the real action of the heart and the course it took through the arteries. this dramatically changed how surgery was performed.
• In Cambridge, teachers dissected bodies in front of the students. This is how the students learned.
• There were no anesthetics back then and surgery was therefore a very painful process. The anesthetics that they did have either did not work or had the potential to kill the patient.
• Doctors didn't clean their instruments very well before and after surgery.

Additional Facts

• St. Bartholomew's hospital was one of the two hospitals in London that cared for poor people.
• Heinrico Sayer treated many victims of the plague and before he treated each victim, he would take a big gulp of wine. Surprisingly, this preserved him for a long time.
• Before the Black Death, hospitals had existed solely to quarantine the unhealthy, hospitals in the post Plague era began to regard the ill as non-quarantinable and therefore the objects of potential study.
• Jan Baptista Van Helmont believed that fever was not due to an excess or unbalanced humours but was a reaction to an invading irritating agent. He declined to do bloodletting or purging and rejected their supposed value in restoring humoural balance.

The beliefs of the Elizabethans

Many of the medecine in the Elizabethan era was solely based off of their beliefs. They had textbooks over 1,400 yars old because nobody dared contradict what they said!

• New discoveries made by scientists were ignored or were disproved by other scientists that didn't use real scientific proof
• Diseases were thought to be spread by bad odours or, a more common belief, "sins of the souls"
• The most common belief among physicians was that 4 humours or fluids entered the composition of the body: blood, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile). It was believed that too much of any one of these humours caused disease and the cure lay in purging or avoiding the peccant humour, by reducing the amount of blood by cupping or reducing the bile by means of drugs
• Some people thought the best medicine was to run away from the illness.
• When a person was ill, tradition dictated that the priest should be summoned before the doctor. If a doctor did find himself first on the scene, the first thing he had to find out was whether or not the ill person had confessed to the priest. If not he would have to call a priest to come.

Thanks for listening!!!!