7 misconceptions of medieval medicine about the human body and health

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Most of these superstitions have existed since the days of Ancient Greece and Rome. And some were in use in the 19th century.

1. The state of the body is determined by the balance of four fluids

In ancient times, under the influence of such cool guys as Hippocrates and Galen, a theory was formed that was designed to explain the appearance of any disease. It was called humoralism. And this theory prevailed until the 17th century.

Humors are four fluids in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile. Their balance supposedly determines the state of health and temperament of a person.

Some ancient authors also contrived to compare them with the seasons, natural elements, signs of the zodiac and other things necessary in the anamnesis.

The theory of humors was not only meaningless, but also harmful, because it was based on 1.

2. hazardous medical practices. For example, bloodletting or taking emetics, laxatives and diuretics.

People with fever or fever were placed in the cold to cool and "balance" humors. Arsenic was used to draw out excess bodily fluids. Patients were given tobacco or sage to flush phlegm from the brain. And all this is to bring harmony to bodily fluids.

2. Bloodletting is great

Since diseases were caused by imbalances in body fluids, draining the excess meant curing the patient. It is logical.

Even the ancient doctors Erasistratus, Arhagat and Galen considered 1.

2. plethora is the cause of a lot of problems. Bloodletting, or phlebotomy, or scarification, was used in Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and they did not disdain it in Muslim countries either. And this practice existed until the middle of the 19th century.

In Medieval Europe, bloodletting was used with and without reason - for colds, gout, fever, inflammation, and sometimes just for prevention. It's like eating a vitamin, only better. The procedure was performed not by doctors, but by ordinary hairdressers, barbers.

We make an extra hole in the patient, the disease follows, we bandage the hole. It's simple.

Blood could be drained not only from the limbs, but also from other parts of the body - even from the genitals. The belief in the healing effect of bloodletting can be partly explained by the fact that with the same fever, the exsanguinated patient stops twitching and rushing about in delirium and falls asleep, which was noticed by the ancient aesculapians.

But in fact, the relief from scarification is imaginary, and ancient doctors rather helped patients die than recover. Indeed, together with the blood, the body loses strength. Therefore, in modern medicine, bloodletting in most cases is considered useless and even harmful. It is sometimes used for some diseases like hemochromatosis, but that's all.

3. Muscles work on "animal electricity"

In 1791, physiologist Luigi Galvani published 1.

2. the book "Treatise on the forces of electricity during muscle movement." In it, he described the results of his eleven years of experiments on frogs. Galvani touched the nerve endings of the prepared amphibians with copper and iron hooks, which caused their paws to twitch - as if the frogs were still alive.

From this, Galvani concluded that the muscles of living beings work on natural electricity, which they also generate.

His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, continued his uncle's experiments with life-giving electricity. And in one of the experiments, he even made the body of the executed criminal twitch, shocking him with a current as it should. Mary Shelley saw this and wrote her Frankenstein.

As a matter of fact, neurons for work really create a weak current, but it has nothing to do with Galvani's "animal electricity". Physicist Alessandro Volta, a contemporary of Luigi, immediately said that the current is generated due to the potential difference between copper and iron, and the properties of frog neurophysiology have nothing to do with it. Otherwise, you can see the rudiments of the nervous system.

4. Moxibustion heals wounds. And hemorrhoids

People have been burning wounds since time immemorial. This method is mentioned in the ancient Egyptian Surgical Papyrus and the Hippocratic Corpus. The practice was also used by the Chinese, Arabs, Persians and Europeans.

The essence of moxibustion was as follows: a piece of iron or other metal was heated over a fire, and then applied to the wound. This made it possible to stop the bleeding, since the blood quickly clots from high temperatures.

Moxibustion was also used to "heal" the gums after tooth extraction. And the doctors of medieval Europe loved to heal hemorrhoids with a hot iron 1.

2.. These, no doubt, useful, procedures should be combined with the attachment of leeches around the anus and prayers to Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of hemorrhoid sufferers.

And the bullet wounds were sterilized with boiling oil. It was assumed that it was not the wound itself that killed, but the poisonous lead from which the bullets were cast. And he was "neutralized" in such an original way.

Naturally, such an appeal did not add health to anyone.

It was only in the 16th century that the French surgeon-barber Ambroise Paré began to vaguely suspect that moxibustion was not so useful. He noticed that patients who underwent this procedure tended to die. But the lucky ones, whom he did not burn with a red-hot iron as an experiment, recovered more and more often.

As a result, Paré concluded that it was time to quit with boiling oil and hot pokers, and this turned out to be a truly progressive solution for that time.

5. Worms cause dental disease

For most of history, people have suffered from dental problems. All sorts of strengthening and whitening pastes, powders and balms have been invented relatively recently. And earlier, to cleanse the mouth, more and more unexpected things had to be used - leaves, fish bones, porcupine quills, bird feathers, salt, soot, crushed seashells and other gifts of nature. And the Romans, for example, generally rinsed their mouths with urine. Here.

Naturally, in combination with not the healthiest diets, this all led to tooth decay 1.

2. and other troubles that dentists of the past tried to treat as best they could - pulling out affected (and sometimes healthy) teeth.

By studying torn incisors, canines and molars, ancient healers found a logical explanation for why they hurt. It's simple: they get worms.

Records of this appeared 1.

2. in the medical texts of the Babylonians, Sumerians, Chinese, Romans, English, Germans and other peoples. And in some countries, the belief in tooth worms persisted until the 20th century.

They fought the damned parasites with very sophisticated methods: they tried to lure them out with honey or drive them away with the smell of onions, they cleaned the gums of worms with donkey milk or the touch of a living frog. In short, we enjoyed ourselves as best we could.

Here are just worms in the teeth, even in the most advanced cases, are not found. For those the aesculapians of the past took dental nerves, dying pulp or microscopic canals inside torn molars. Caries is caused by plaque and bacteria that multiply in the oral cavity.

6. Enemas improve mood and well-being

Medieval enema is a really harsh thing 1.

2., which was made from the bladder of a pig and a tube from an elderberry branch. The device was used to introduce into the patient's body very original substances designed to cleanse the whole body and improve digestion.

Among them are bile or boar urine, mallow leaves and wheat bran diluted with water, honey, vinegar, soap, rock salt or baking soda. The lucky ones could just be injected with water with rose petals.

The French “sun king” Louis XIV was a real fan 1.

2. enemas. More than two thousand of them were made to him, and sometimes the procedure was performed right on the throne. The courtiers followed the example of the majesty, and it became simply fashionable to take medicine by the rectal method.

In addition to enemas, they were also addicted to a laxative made from flax seeds, fried in fat. It was administered orally and anally.

And also in Europe, from the 18th to the 19th century, the enemas Hurt, Raymond were used; Barry, J. E.; Adams, A. P.; Fleming, P. R. The History of Cardiothoracic Surgery from Early Times with Tobacco Smoke. It was believed that tobacco is good for breathing. It has been used to treat a number of headaches, respiratory distress, colds, hernias, abdominal cramps, typhoid fever, and cholera. They also reanimated drowned people with tobacco enemas.

7. Any diagnosis can be made by the color and taste of urine

Until the beginning of the 16th century, scientists in Europe and the Muslim East were dominated by the idea that the color, smell, temperature and taste of a patient's urine can tell a lot about his state of health.

This technique was called uroscopy, and Babylonian and Sumerian doctors began to practice it in 4000 BC. Thanks to the works of Hippocrates and Galen, uroscopy became very popular in the ancient world, and later in the Middle Ages.

To analyze urine, the Aesculapians used the "urine wheel" diagram found in most medical reference books of the time, and transparent glass flasks, matulas. Purely theoretically, in some cases, the procedure makes sense. For example, when diagnosed with diabetes (urine becomes sweetish), jaundice (becomes brown) and kidney disease (becomes reddish or frothy).

The problem is that doctors tried to associate all diseases with urine. And some even made diagnoses only by the contents of the matula, without examining the patient at all - for the purity of the experiment. Moreover, they tried to understand even a person's temperament from urine.