This medical \u2018renaissance\u2019 led to new understanding of the circulation of the blood<\/a>, anatomy, the causes and effects of disease and surgery to name a few. The treatment of battlefield wounds improved \u2013 constant wars and fighting throughout these centuries meant surgeons had plenty of opportunity to try new things and benefited from new studies of anatomy.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, life expectancy remained low and diseases, notably plague<\/a>, were still rife. Conditions may, in fact, have been worse than the medieval era at times, due to the growth of cities, where sanitation was poor. Voyages of discovery brought new remedies to Europe but transported infectious diseases like smallpox<\/a> to the New World, creating huge mortality in populations unfamiliar with these diseases.<\/p>\n New world plants like sarsaparilla and snakeroot were brought back to Europe and eager adopted. Tobacco<\/a>, too, was brought from the New World to the Old, initially as a kind of cure-all for any number of ailments. Quickly it left medicine behind to become the recreational substance we know today.<\/p>\n The theory of the humours continued to shape learned medicine\u2019s approach to healing. Bloodletting and purges were the mainstays of therapy. Prayers and charms remained regular preventative measures to keep disease and death at bay, and some people turned to the monarch rather than medical professionals for healthcare.<\/p>\n The \u2018king\u2019s touch\u2019 was a much-vaunted ceremony in France and England, where it was believed that a monarch laying their hands on the sick would cure them of the \u2018king\u2019s evil\u2019, or scrofula (a form of tuberculosis<\/a> that could go away on its own). Charles II<\/a> of England is thought to have performed the touch on as many as 90,000 people. Ordinary folk who might not be able to afford a university-educated physician relied on domestic medicine. Many ailments get better on their own, and careful nursing at home helped many people survive episodes of illness.<\/p>\n Trained and trustworthy physicians were expensive so only the wealthy could benefit from their wisdom. Most people got medicine and medical advice at the apothecary\u2019s shop, or made their own medicines with herbs gathered locally or purchased at the market. However, new kinds of commercial practitioners also began vying for custom. They sold new and exciting remedies, already packaged up, sometimes with pamphlets of information for the users. Such practitioners were often labelled \u201cquacks\u201d by the learned physicians who did not like the competition; Britain did not pass comprehensive laws to control who could hand out medical advice until the mid-19th century.<\/p>\n At the same time as the so-called quacks, however, more people than ever were showing an interest in scientific understanding thanks to the advent of the printing press. This enabled medical texts to spread quickly across Europe. Professor Mary Fissell suggests that with access to more texts came the initiative to be more questioning. \u201cPhysicians began to get critical about what they were reading, and more sophisticated with it,\u201d she says. \u201cFor the first time, people were saying, \u2018This classical authority isn\u2019t quite right for where I am.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For centuries, dissecting the human body was viewed as a desecration. Although, Fissell points out that the idea the Catholic Church banned it was a myth: \u201cIt came from surgeons and anatomists wanting to portray themselves as heroic battlers against superstition. A pope decreed something in 1215, which has been misread again and again as the church being against dissection,\u201d she says. \u201cThe church didn\u2019t like surgeons sneaking into graveyards at night and digging up bodies. That was desecration, after all. The problem was with how they got the bodies, not with the practice of dissection itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Physicians became more curious and willing to study inside the human body and, in 1543, the anatomist Andreas Vesalius published his epochal work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (\u2018On the Fabric of the Human Body\u2019). He advocated the need for dissection and was able to prove that some long-held beliefs about the body \u2013 going back to the time of Galen \u2013 were wrong.<\/p>\n Another graduate of Padua University in Italy, William Harvey<\/a>, made another anatomical breakthrough almost a century later by accurately describing the circulation of blood around the body by the heart. This disproved once and for all another aspect of Galenic medicine. Then, in 1761, another professor at Padua, Italian physician Giovanni Battista Morgagni, published De sedibus et causis morborum per anatomen indagatis (\u2018The Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy\u2019) containing more than 60 years of work on the causes of disease. By conducting post-mortem examinations, he developed the science of pathological anatomy.<\/p>\n In the 17th century, scientific and medical men began to investigate the unseen world by using the new invention of the microscope. The English polymath Robert Hooke published images of what he saw under the microscope, coining the word \u201ccell\u201d to describe the structure of cork. The Dutchman Antoine van Leeuwenhoek had used magnifying glasses to inspect the quality of fabrics he bought and sold, and then developed a new kind of microscope, seeing little wiggling \u201canimalcules\u201d (bacteria) and spermatozoa for the first time.<\/p>\n In the field of surgery, the French battlefield barber surgeon Ambroise Par\u00e9 made innovations in treating wounds and invented instruments in the 16th century, earning him the nickname, \u2018the father of modern surgery\u2019. He was a modest man who often claimed that \u201cI bandaged him and God healed him\u201d.<\/p>\n For all the advancements, though, the early modern period continued to experience devastating mortality from the plague. From 1665 to 1666, the Great Plague<\/a> ravaged London, killing an estimated 100,000 people, and the medical world was largely powerless to help.<\/p>\n The miasma theory led people to carry bottles of perfume, burn sweet-scented herbs in one\u2019s home, or light fires in the streets to purify the air. Continued belief in humoural theory meant that bloodletting was still being regularly prescribed to restore the balance of the fluids in the body. Other ways to ward off plague were to carry lucky charms, such as a hare\u2019s foot, or rubbing the plague sores with a live chicken. Houses were fumigated or, if those inside were already ill, closed off and marked with a cross.<\/p>\nQuacks and questioning<\/h3>\n
![\"""\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/11\/GettyImages599961869-6169a22-e1669109582392.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413"\" "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>![\"""\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/11\/GettyImages188002014-6bf4e57-e1669110595988.jpg?quality=90&resize=274%2C413"\" "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Curing the Plague<\/h3>\n
![\"""\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/11\/GettyImages526344394-d42dc6d-e1669109611393.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C412"\" "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
![\"""\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/11\/GettyImages179807341-3f6e319-e1669110087829.jpg?quality=90&resize=619%2C412"\" "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>