Explain Why There Was Continuity in the Way Disease Was Treated in the Period C1500-C1700

Explain why there was continuity in the way disease was treated in the period c1500-c1700

During the period c1500-c1700 there remained to be many continuities in the way diseases were treated, due to factors such as, the Great Plague, societal attitudes, the Church and a lack of medical education/ training.

The treatments for the plague remained similar and ineffective with concepts like transference, which was the idea of giving the disease to another object e.g. a chicken. Also, herbal remedies continued to be extremely popular in the form of medicines, poultices or rubs. During the time, there was still an uncertainty around the cause of the plague, and therefore no one could treat it properly, so the best advice and assurance of survival was just to avoid catching it in the first place. There was a lack of risk surrounding the experimentation of new solutions and a lack of access/ money to physicians, leading to quack doctors (people without medical qualifications who sold their services as a doctor) becoming more popular.

The attitudes of society also contributed to the absence of change of treatments. Community care was more of a common practice, despite of the changes to hospitals, as the local communities were close-knit, also not everyone could afford to go to a licensed physician or apothecary. Family members would give advice and mix remedies, as well as some rich, well-born women who kept detailed notes of the healing and treatment they carried out, and mixed and sold simple remedies to purge the body or cure ailments. Additionally, even though important discoveries were starting to occur more frequently, such as Harvey’s research on anatomical knowledge, the impacts of these discoveries were slow acting. He did encourage other scientists to experiment on actual bodies, which had previously been strictly forbidden by the Church, however the understanding of the circulation of the blood didn’t have much practical use in medical treatment, so the impact was quite limited. Furthermore, many were resistant to change the long-withstanding ideas of Galen, so doctors ignored Harvey and some openly criticised him and reasoned that the knowledge that blood flowed to the heart didn’t cure anyone of disease. Finally, people still believed in old ideas such as miasma, astrology and God’s punishment, although fewer people believed in the Theory of the Four Humours – though there was no proven alternative to this. Without knowing the actual cause of the diseases/ illnesses, there wasn’t enough to go off of to find the cures.

As mentioned above, the Church still promoted the diseases/ illnesses as a punishment from God to cleanse the people of their sins, which scared many away from questioning this belief, as to go against God would be a sin, leading to an afterlife in hell. Without experimentation new ideas couldn’t be developed, also when new theories came about, without the technology, even educated scientists weren’t able to prove their theories, so people were hesitant to change beliefs, especially as the same ideas (of Galen and Hippocrates) had been so prominent for many years.