Renaissance Medicine (AQA GCSE History: Thematic Study (Paper 2: Section A)): Flashcards

The scientist who used dissection to gain a better understanding of the digestive system was Jan Baptiste van Helmont.

True.

The development of new weapons in the Renaissance caused more complex wounds that needed surgery.

An anatomist is a person who studies the structure of the human body; Vesalius was a famous anatomist.

Vesalius lectured in the Italian city of Padua, a centre for medical knowledge.

Andreas Vesalius trained as an anatomist in Paris in 1533.

The book Vesalius published in 1543 was titled On the Fabric of the Human Body.

In his book, Vesalius noted over 300 mistakes Galen had made on the human anatomy.

According to Vesalius, the lower jaw is made of one part, not two as Galen claimed.

True.

Vesalius showed that men and women have the same number of ribs.

Galen had made mistakes about the human body that Vesalius corrected because he had based his work on animal dissections.

While teaching at Padua, Vesalius inspired the future anatomist William Harvey.

False.

His discoveries were about the body's structure, not how illnesses could be cured.

Traditional physicians who believed in Galen reacted to Vesalius's work with anger, arguing the human anatomy must have changed since Roman times.

Vesalius encouraged physicians rather than surgeons to perform dissections.

In the 16th century, Ambroise Paré's job was a French battlefield (barber) surgeon.

Ambroise Paré served four French kings during his career.

A ligature is a thread used to tie blood vessels closed, used by Paré instead of cauterising with hot oil.

Paré's ointment for gunshot wounds was made up of egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine.

In 1537, during a battle, Paré ran out of oil and began treating wounds with an ointment instead.

Before Paré's ointment, surgeons cauterised gunshot wounds using hot oil.

To help amputee soldiers in their daily lives, Paré designed artificial (prosthetic) limbs.

False.

Tying blood vessels took longer, which was a problem in battlefield surgery.

Patients still often died of infection despite Paré's ligatures because the ligatures were unclean, introducing bacteria into wounds.

The surgeon to Queen Elizabeth I who used Paré's techniques, popularising them in England, was William Clowes.

False.

Paré did not know about germs.

Paré's work contributed to a decline in support for Galen's work, which also reduced the power of the Church over medicine.

By 1618, William Harvey was doctor to King James I.

Harvey carried out public dissections as a lecturer of anatomy at the College of Physicians in London.

Harvey had been taught Vesalius' theory, sparking his interest in anatomy.

Harvey discovered that the heart works like a pump, pushing blood around the body through arteries and veins.

Harvey published his findings in a book in the year 1628.

Harvey disproved Galen's theory that the liver created blood.

Harvey demonstrated blood flow by tying a rope around a person's arm; loosening it showed blood flowing down into the forearm and back up.

Harvey calculated that, if Galen was right, a human would need to make 1800 litres of blood a day to survive.

The circulation system is the system in which the heart pumps blood around the body through arteries and veins linked together.

True.

Many Renaissance physicians ignored Harvey's work because it had limited use in treatment.

Harvey's understanding of circulation helped enable the 19th- and 20th-century development of blood transfusions.

Universities only began using medical textbooks containing Harvey's work from 1673.

Miasma was the theory that disease is caused by bad air; it remained hugely influential and increased in importance during epidemics.

True.

Belief in miasma continued into the Renaissance and grew during epidemics.

The theory of disease that decreased in influence among physicians by the 17th century was the Theory of the Four Humours.

The general public still only wanted their condition explained in terms of the Four Humours.

In everyday Renaissance life, it was now understood that God did not make people ill.

Belief in the supernatural practice of astrology declined by the 16th century.

Alchemy was an early form of chemistry that originally focused on trying to convert metal into gold.

The Swiss scientist who used alchemy to create chemical treatments was Paracelsus.

According to Paracelsus, small doses of mercury could cure syphilis.

Transference was the idea that touching an object or another animal could move a disease from one thing to another.

The tiny 'animalcules' that Antony van Leeuwenhoek observed under a microscope were the first sighting of bacteria.

Most people in the Renaissance still did not know the real causes of disease because Germ Theory had not been discovered yet.

In transference, physicians strapped live chickens onto plague buboes hoping to move the disease.

Epidemiology is the study of how diseases spread.

Iatrochemistry became increasingly popular in the 17th century and stemmed from experimenting with metals to create chemical cures.

The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1618) included over 2000 remedies, using 122 different chemical combinations.

Antimony potassium tartrate became popular after stories it cured Louis XIV of typhoid fever.

The bark of the Cinchona tree was used as a new remedy to treat malaria.

Lemons and limes were new ingredients from exploration used to treat scurvy.

True.

Humoural treatments such as bloodletting remained popular in Renaissance Britain.

In times of plague, people wore charms to ward off 'evil spirits'.

False.

People relied less and less on supernatural treatments.

A quack was a fake doctor with no medical qualifications who sold cures to the public.

Many quack remedies contained honey or alcohol, which relieved pain in the short term but had no healing properties.

Quack doctors continued to be a problem in England until the 20th century.

The Great Plague broke out in the year 1665.

Most people believed the main cause of the Great Plague was miasma (bad air).

In late 1664 people believed that an unusual alignment between the planets and a comet in the sky were unlucky.

True.

Some people correctly believed the plague spread from person to person.

Strapping a live chicken to a bubo was meant to draw out the plague and pass it onto the chicken (transference).

Physicians wrapped plague patients in woollen cloths by the fire to allow the patient to sweat the plague out of their body.

A poultice was a herbal remedy placed on a wound.

Birds' beaks were used in the design of plague doctors' masks because birds were thought to attract disease, so the plague would move from the victim to the doctor's mask.

Plague water was a herbal remedy recommended by apothecaries during the Great Plague.

Charles II released a royal decree of rules to help avoid catching the plague.

Under the decree, people with the plague faced a 28-day forced quarantine.

A red cross was used to mark plague-infested houses.

The job of the 'watchmen' hired by the mayor during the Great Plague was to monitor those in quarantine to ensure they stayed.

Like surgeons, apothecaries required a licence to practise their craft.

A surgeon completed an apprenticeship under a master barber-surgeon to learn their skills.

The survival rate for Renaissance surgery remained poor because patients had no pain relief (dying from shock), lost too much blood, and dirty equipment caused infection.

The printing press changed the training of physicians by leading to a wider selection of textbooks on topics such as anatomy and iatrochemistry.

Body-snatching was the illegal digging up of bodies by medical students or criminals to perform dissection; it became a craze in the 18th century.

Burke and Hare killed 16 victims to sell to anatomist Robert Knox.

True.

Physician training in the Renaissance remained mostly theoretical rather than hands-on.

The most common place for people to receive medical treatment in the Renaissance was the home.

The London College of Physicians punished women for practising medicine without a licence.

The dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 led to the closure of many hospitals.

The priority of hospitals changed from the medieval period into the Renaissance from caring for patients through comfort and prayer to attempting to cure them using medical treatments.

The 'Idle Poor' could not access hospital care because they could not pay their bills.

Florence Nightingale promoted 'pavilion style' hospitals, built on open ground with separate wings.

The 18th-century surgeon John Hunter was Scottish.

John Hunter became surgeon to King George III in 1776.

In 1790 Hunter took up the role of Surgeon-General of the Army.

Hunter wrongly believed that the same bacteria caused both gonorrhoea and syphilis.

Hunter's 1767 venereal disease experiment gave a misleading result because the needle used to inject gonorrhoea was contaminated with syphilis.

Hunter advised surgeons not to cut around gunshot wounds, and to use amputation only as a last resort.

Hunter theorised that by restricting blood vessels he could encourage new blood vessels to form, helping to save limbs.

Hunter injected wax into blood vessels to expand them and study blood circulation.

True.

Hunter's anatomical specimens came from body snatching.

Hunter taught the famous future surgeon Edward Jenner.

Hunter opened an anatomy school in 1764.

John Hunter's collection of anatomy can still be viewed today at The Hunterian Museum.

Inoculation was a method to prevent smallpox where pus from a smallpox scab was rubbed into a cut or snorted up the nose.

Smallpox was so dangerous that it killed as many as 30% of victims, most of them children.

The 18th-century doctor Edward Jenner worked in Gloucestershire.

Jenner gathered over 1000 cases of failed inoculation.

Jenner noticed that dairymaids, who regularly caught cowpox, did not catch smallpox during epidemics.

The young boy Jenner gave cowpox to in 1796 was James Phipps.

The word 'vaccination' comes from the Latin 'vacca' for cow.

Jenner published his findings on the smallpox vaccine in 1798.

The government made it illegal to inoculate people in 1840.

True.

In 1852 the government made the smallpox vaccination compulsory for children up to 3 months old.

The Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League was created to oppose the compulsory smallpox vaccine.

By 1979, the World Health Organisation declared that smallpox no longer spreads naturally or exists in humans.

A key limitation of Jenner's method for other diseases was that it would not work for any disease except smallpox.