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Medicine in Britain, c1250–present

Ideas about the cause of disease and illness, c1500–c1700

  • 3 things to know
  • Paper 1

Overview

Miasma and the humours after 1500, the decline of supernatural explanations, Thomas Sydenham's observation of patients, scarlet fever, Observationes Medicae, the printing press, and the Royal Society and Philosophical Transactions.

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Which older explanation of disease was still widely believed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

Key term

Which explanation of illness became much less common among educated people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

Who and when

Who was Thomas Sydenham?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Which older explanation of disease was still widely believed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

    Model answer

    Miasma, and the Theory of the Four Humours was still taught, although fewer physicians relied on it by 1700.

  2. 2

    Which explanation of illness became much less common among educated people in this period?

    Model answer

    Blaming God or the Devil, as supernatural causes were increasingly doubted.

  3. 3

    Who was Thomas Sydenham?

    Model answer

    A seventeenth-century London doctor, nicknamed the English Hippocrates, who changed the way patients were diagnosed.

  4. 4

    What was Sydenham’s main change to the way a doctor reached a diagnosis?

    Model answer

    He watched the patient closely and recorded the symptoms, instead of relying on what the medical books said should happen.

  5. 5

    What did Sydenham argue about the nature of a disease?

    Model answer

    That each disease was a distinct thing with its own pattern of symptoms, not simply an imbalance inside one individual.

  6. 6

    Which illness did Sydenham identify and name as separate from measles?

    Model answer

    Scarlet fever.

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