Lesson 4: Medicine in the Scientific Revolution
The lesson covers changes in medicine from the humanist era to William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood.
Introduction
Renaissance Europe’s largest scientific community was that of physicians and other medical practitioners. Many sciences which are today thought of as distant from medicine, such as botany, were considered areas of medical science in the early modern period. Physicians were, in one way, also the most inclusive of Europe’s scientific communities. The only learned profession open to both Christians and Jews was that of physician.
Other medical professionals in the early modern period included surgeons, which were an entirely different profession, whose work was restricted to injuries and conditions which affected the “outside” of the body. Another group, less influenced by the changes of the scientific revolution, was midwives, whose effective monopoly over childbirth was not challenged by male practitioners in this period.
The traditional medicine of European physicians is referred to as “Galenic,” after the ancient physician Galen. Some of early modern Galenism sprung from Galen’s voluminous works, but some practices came from other ancient sources by the generations of Byzantine, Arabic and Latin writers who had commented and expanded on Galen. Indeed, the basic Galenic textbook in medical schools was not a work by Galen, but Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine.
Galen and his successors argued that the true physician was not just a technician but a philosopher, a doctrine congenial to the university setting in which physicians were taught. Although Galen disagreed with Aristotle on some issues, Galenic medicine analyzed the body in the basically Aristotelian terms of the four elements - air, earth, water and fire - so Galenic medicine was quite compatible with Aristotelian natural philosophy.
These Aristotelian physical elements correlated with the four bodily substances known as humours, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood. In practice, Galenic medicine was more oriented to preserving health by maintaining the humours in balance than by preventing and curing specific diseases. Galenic physicians were holists, who believed that treatments focusing on less than the whole body were fit only for surgeons.
Traditional medicine was challenged on many fronts in the Renaissance. The most dramatic challenge was presented by the appearance of what was thought to be a new disease, syphilis. Syphilis was thought at the time to have originated from the newly discovered Americas. It received its name from a poem by the Italian physician-cartographer-astronomer-poet Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilis, the French Disease (1530), whose title character is a shepherd cursed by the god Apollo with a particularly loathsome disease. Whatever syphilis’s origin, it was not dealt with by the ancients.
Also not found in ancient textbooks were the many new plants (new to Europeans, at least) of purported medical value found in the New World and Asia.
Within the Galenic tradition, a classical revival sought to bring back the original texts of Galen and other ancient physicians such as Hippocrates, and anatomists questioned the accuracy of some of Galen’s assertions. Outside the Galenic tradition, the radical Paracelsus launched a new medical system that gained popularity in many areas.
