European Medical practioners during the renaissance
Created | Updated May 3, 2006
Physicians
The first was university-trained physicians, they would have trained at one of the many schools around Europe, these schools were usually run by the church and had been done so for a few centuries, Physicians would have trained at one of these schools for usually 3 years then gone elsewhere to study, and physicians may have also studied at Padua because of the welcoming attitude to dissecting corpses and the abundance of artists who were willing and experienced in the painting of dissections. They were the most respected of medical people. They mainly gave treatments based around the theory of the four humours. Bleeding, blistering, diaretics, emetics. Were all favourite treatments for Renaissance physicians. The theory of the four humours being that the body contained four humours that always needed to be in balance, or else a person would become ill, the four humours being, Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile. Most did not question the works of Galen except for a small few including, Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey. The average fee for a physician was two weeks wages for a labourer thus why the poor were driven to go to travelling quacks with their medical problems. Most physicians worked in large towns where they could find wealthy patients such as Royalty or rich lawyers.
Apothecaries
Apothecaries were untrained and mainly prescribed medicines from what they had learned from past experiences, they were different to wise women because they used new herbs brought over from the Americas by the explorers of the time. Such as Cinchona, which was used to cure, fevers. And also unlike wise women they were normally set up in a shop in a town or city. From which they would dispense not only the medicines themselves but also tobacco and probably opium. Apothecaries were reliant on the physicians and barber surgeons to do their work just as the physicians and barber surgeons needed Apothecaries to do their work.
Surgeons
Surgeons-Barbers preformed surgery and were considered inferior to physicians. This was before the time of anti septics, which caused a lot of surgeons to lose their patients to infection. Probably the most famous surgeon of the Renaissance is most probably Ambroise Paré. Who’s idea of using ligatures was held back by anti septic not being discovered. Barber-surgeons would usually be looking after wounded soldiers or pulling teeth or removing gallstones or cataracts. What surgeons discovered about human anatomy helped saved lives in the short term, like when Ambroise Paré discovered that shot wounds healed faster when the were not scalded with oil. And when he used an old Roman mixture to treat the wounds it helped medicine then and there. Rather than any discoveries that the physicians made which did not affect peoples health for hundreds of years, like William Harvey’s discovery about how the blood moves around the body, the original belief was that blood was created by the liver and burned up in the body, Harvey disagreed and said that the blood was reused, although this was an important discovery it did not help people at the time.
Wise women or village midwife
A Wise woman was the main person who you would consult in the village if you had a medical problem. There was always one wise woman in every village, which would almost certainly have had deep supernatural beliefs. She would hand out herbal remedies and was untrained and only learnt what she could from past experience and what knowledge was handed down. Although wise women’s treatments could be just supernatural herbal remedies, they could still help people, whether it was actually physically curing their ailment or convincing the patient that it was cured. Otherwise known as the placebo affect. A wise woman was also a midwife so could also be known as a village midwife.
Travelling Quacks
Finally there is the Travelling quacks who were untrained but they were a popular choice for poor people because the cheap. They generally just travelled around the country from town to town. They would hand out herbal remedies and often perform minor surgery for a small fee. The herbal remedies rarely had an ingredient that actually treated the ailment but an ingredient that made them think that they had been treated. And some of the remedies could include poisons such as arsenic or mercury, making them dangerous to use. Physicians often despised the travelling quacks.
