Medical progress

Overview

How the Church both helped the sick and held back medicine, the purpose of medieval hospitals such as St Bartholomew's, the Islamic medicine of Avicenna, Rhazes and Albucasis, and medieval surgery, including pain relief, cautery and the work of John of Arderne.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   In what practical ways did the Christian Church help the sick in medieval England?

   Model answer

   Monasteries gave food, warmth and nursing to travellers and the poor, and religious orders founded and paid for hospitals in the towns.

2. 2

   How did the Church also stand in the way of progress?

   Model answer

   It restricted the dissection of bodies, insisted Galen's teaching was correct because it fitted its own beliefs, and taught that prayer and repentance mattered more than investigation.

3. 3

   What was the main purpose of a medieval hospital?

   Model answer

   To care for the sick rather than to cure them, with rest, food, warmth and prayer, and many turned away anyone with an infectious disease.

4. 4

   Name an English hospital founded in the Middle Ages that survives today.

   Model answer

   St Bartholomew's in London, founded in 1123 by the monk Rahere.

5. 5

   Why was medicine in the Islamic world ahead of western Europe?

   Model answer

   Its scholars translated and preserved Greek learning, ran large public hospitals in cities such as Baghdad and Cairo, and were encouraged to add to what they read.

6. 6

   Who was Avicenna and what did he write?

   Model answer

   An Islamic physician whose Canon of Medicine gathered the whole of known medical learning into one work, used as a textbook in European universities for centuries.

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