The Role Of Medicine In The Middle Ages

Medicine is a necessity, no matter what time period. Medicine in the Middle Ages was a very important necessity. Back then, medicine was not as advanced as it is today, so there we no electrical machines. All the doctors could use were their own hands and/or very strange medical techniques. To explore medicine in the Middle Ages, one must understand the two important figures during that time, illnesses and how they were treated, the roles of women, and the education of medicine.
During the Middle Ages, theories from ancient Greece and Rome were very influental in the field of medicine. Pioneers named Hippocrates, who lived c. 460 to c. 370 B.C. in Greece, and Galen, who lived A.D. 129 to 199 in Rome, were men who looked for natural causes of
New doctors came from the universities where they were trained. Between 1000 and 1100 at Salerno in southern Italy, the first medical school was established and "according to legend, its first teachers were four wise men – a Latin scholar, a Greek, an Arab and a Jew" (Macdonald 30). Even if this legend is false, it still explains how medical knowledge from those civilizations were known there. In the years between 1100 and 1230, multiple universities were set up. "The most important were in Paris and Toulouse in France; Bologna, Padua, and Naples in Italy; and Oxford and Cambridge in England" (Macdonald 30). To be a doctor, it at least took several years. Due to religion, "the trainee doctors had to promise obedience to the pope and devotion to God" (Macdonald 30). Trainee doctors were not allowed to marry as well. A trainee doctor's curriculum consisted of religion, mathematics, astronomy, grammar, rhetoric, music, philosophy, and more medical subjects. On average, a university would produce between one and ten doctors that were fully trained each year. All of these long years of education qualified doctors that were greatly needed and they earned high fees. Most of them were physicians that worked for the richest and most powerful people in Europe. Physicians tried maintaining their patients' good health and cure diseases by giving them advice for their lifestyle, and medicinal herbs and
Other university-trained doctors worked as surgeons. In northern and southern Europe, surgeons were treated differently. Southern Europe respected surgeons and paid them just as much as physicians, but northern Europe did not pay them as well and their work was less prestigious. Two reasons as to why they were both treated differently is because southern European rules demanded that all doctors were required to have surgical training, but this background wasn’t required in northern Europe, so university-trained surgeons were rare. The second reason was because northern Europe had barber surgeons. Barber surgeons, unlike physicians, practiced hands-on medicine. By hands-on medicine that means “they stitched cuts, pulled teeth, dressed wounds and sores, applied ointments, lanced boils, stopped hemorrhages (sudden bleeding), gave enemas, and cut out tumors” (Macdonald