Thomas Sydenham - The English Hipocrates

Thomas Sydenham has been referred to as the English Hippocrates because he rejected the idea of the four humours and pushed his idea that something external caused disease.  Therefore is you fell ill; something has made you ill and that it was the illness that needed treating and not the balance of the humours in your body.

I am not going to repeat a biography on Sydenham here which can be found at the Science Museum or on the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  Click on the links to find out more about him.

The BBC Bitesize also has a useful piece on how he fits into the bigger picture in the Renaissance.

Other people who are significant and are worth doing some research are listed below.  Each one has a link for you to investigate.

Paracelsus
Robert Hooke - Robert Hooke Website - History of the Microscope - Britannica
Antony van Leeuwenhoek - BBC - History of the Microscope - Britannica

Look at the pictures.  Can you work out which doctor each one is?

Three key Renaissance Doctors - Vesalius, Pare and Paracelsus

For  our purposes the Renaissance begins around 1450 to 1500 and lasts to 1750.  It was a period of great discovery and learning.  The term means revival or rediscovery - and refers to the rediscovery and new learning influenced by classical art.  This was also true of Medicine where the classical works of Hippocrates and Galen were investigated and challenged.  Three key people in doing this were; Vesalius, Pare and Harvey.  Below there are links that will take you to other sites that will give you key information on each that will help you make sure you have good notes.  However in short; Vesalius believed that the study of anatomy needed to be based on dissecting human bodies.  His books De humani corporis fabrica used realistic images drawn by artists; his study of the human jawbone was key evidence in proving that Galen was wrong.  Galen had claimed the bone was in two parts whereas Vesalius showed that it was one single piece. Pare developed a key surgical technique showing that improvements could  be made by dressing a wound and using ligatures to tie off veins and arteries.  This was much more effective than cauterizing the wound.  William Harvey proved that the heart was a pump and that the blood circulated through the body in a single direction.  All three provided key discoveries but these took time to be accepted.

This will take you to the BBC GCSE bitesize on surgery including a video.

Click here to find out more about Ambroise Pare

Oh - and don't forget Paracelsus - click here for the science museum biography and here for Britannica.

c1500-c1700: The Medical Renaissance in England

The period from around 1500 to 1700 is known as the Renaissance.  Renaissance is a French worked that means re-birth.  During the Renaissance people started to re-look at Classical learning.  This included re-looking at works such as the Bible and Galen's medical texts.  This means that the renaissance was about so much more than just medicine; it affected art and literature too.

During the Renaissance doctors looked at ancient doctors works and began to test and criticize them.  One of the most famous of these was Vesalius who wrote De Humani Corporis Fabrica which challenged Galen's ideas on anatomy.  As a result of the Renaissance doctors were also beginning to reject the ideas of the Four Humours.

Medieval Hospitals

When studying hospitals during the Middle Ages it is important not to think about the National Health Service (NHS) and modern Hospitals.  Find out about the origins of the word hospital or look at some old maps of town and cities and see how many have areas called hospital fields.  Look at these words and think about what they mean and their origins; Hospital - Hospitality - Hostel - Hotel.

Medieval Hospitals were often attached to Monasteries and Convents; they provided hospitality and rest; limited numbers offered care for the sick and the level of care they provided was limited.  Their was no consistent approach; each Hospital was independent and did things their own way.  Some were set up specifically intended to care for the sick.  The Lord Mayor of London - Richard (Dick) Whittington set up an eight bed chamber at St Thomas's hospital which was intended for unmarried pregnant women.  However, notice how few beds it had and think about how many unmarried pregnant women there would have been in London.  In London another Hospital was set up to care for poor and silly persons called St Mary of Bethlehem later to become known as Bedlam; an infamous Victorian madhouse.

Hospitals were not run by doctors but nuns and monks.  Each Hospital was different depending on the aims of the Abbot in charge, so it is difficult to generalize.  However, in general they provided rest, warmth, food and shelter. Conditions were clean and for many the combination of food and rest was enough for them to recover.  Simple cures or remedies were also offered; the Nuns would provide herbal cures and the monks and nuns would pray for your recovery.  Whether it worked or not is not the issue - they genuinely believed that praying for your recovery was as important as any other treatment.

When it comes to the exam you could well be asked something similar to the following question:

Describe the key features of the care that was available to Patients in English hospitals during the late Middle Ages.

Quiz - How much do you know?

OK - it's time for a quiz.

Go to the following web site https://b.socrative.com/login/student/  Log in as a student and enter the following room MRHNELSON

Put in you name - now clearly you could enter any name you choose; I am trusting you to be sensible.

When answering questions that require an answer where you need to type in text - you will only get the correct answer if your text matches the text I put in as the correct answer.  So if you miss out capital letters - or spell key words wrongly, then you will get a wrong answer.

Finally - I open and close quizzes at different times - so you may find it takes you to a quiz on a completely different topic.

Study hard and give good answers.

Source A – A 15th century woodcut of people burning Jews as a response to the Black Death

What can you learn from Source A about what people thought was to blame for the Black Death?

This is a common question on most GCSE History courses.  It tests your understanding of inference.  Inference or inferring something from a source means you need to be able to understand a source and then come up with an idea of your own about what you can learn from it.

Look at this source: Source A – A 15th century woodcut of people burning Jews as a response to the Black Death

Now write down a list of all the things you can see.

Your list might include:

City walls, rich men, knights, people being burned, a man setting fire to the people with a torch.

Now read the caption; you can learn from this that the people being burned were Jewish and it was a response to the Black Dearth.

Why might Jews be burned because of the Black Death?  It is possible that people believed it was the Jews fault.  Why might they think this?

Now try to write an 8 to 10 line paragraph answering the question at the top of the post.

Case Study - The Black Death

You need to know about the Black Death as a case study and you should reflect on how this tell us more about what we have learnt do far.  However, I am not going to write this up.  Instead go to the links below and see what you can find.  The Dan Snow link is a video.


The BBC

History. com

If you feel like a challenge - History Today

Filthy Cities by Dan Snow


A Black Death Documentary