The Renaissance was a great period of intellectual growth and artistic development in Europe.
. As part of that scientists and thinkers began to shake loose from the traditional views that governed medicine in both the east and the west. The focus of treatments was no longer a divinely ordained natural balance. Knowledge advanced through the scientific method—conducting experiments, collecting observations, reaching conclusions. Information was disseminated by means of an important new technology—printing. The roots of scientific medicine were set.6
The scientific method is applied to medicine:
In 1543 Andreas Vesalius (1514-64), a professor at the University of Padua, published an exquisitely illustrated anatomy text. With knowledge based on extensive dissection of human cadavers, he presented the first largely accurate description of the human body. Later anatomists at Padua included Gabriele Falloppio (1523-62), who described the female reproductive organs, giving his name to the Fallopian tubes, and Girolamo Fabrizio (1537-1619), who identified the valves of the heart.
Surgery was practiced mostly by barbers, who used the same tools for both trades. It remained a pretty primitive and extraordinarily painful business in this era. Controversy continued over wound management—was pus good or bad? Cauterization, the burning of a wound to close it, remained the main way to stop bleeding. Most surgeons learned their skills on the battlefield, and the introduction of gunpowder, guns, and cannons made that a much messier place.
A16th-century French surgeon, Ambroise Paré (c. 1510-90), began to instill some order. He translated some of Vesalius’s work into French to make the new anatomical knowledge available to the battlefield surgeons. With extensive battlefield experience himself, he sewed wounds closed rather than cauterizing them to stop the bleeding during amputations. He replaced the boiling oil used to