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Were medieval doctors really like this?
It was called the dark ages for a reason.
>It was called the dark ages for a reason.
Idiot.
Would you rather live in the Dark Ages, or before that period, during the height of Graeco-Roman civilisation? Thought so.
I'd rather live in the "Dark Ages".
No. Depends on the doctor.
>no
>but actually yes
Yes. Just like today where there are quacks selling "herbal cancer cures", chiropractics, homeopathy, crystal healing and other bullshit to desperate people.
There was no regulation or oversight, you would rely on advice from your family and community about which doctor is reliable and hope they are intelligent and won't flake or scam you.
You wouldn't know any better either. A doctor might offer to open the wound and let it become infested with maggots instead of wrap it up with herbs properties. What do you think about that? You might think this is unhygienic but in fact exposing the wound to oxygen and allowing maggots to consume dead flesh can reduce the risk of infection, whereas the herbs might have been fertilized with human faeces may have the opposite effect. Not even modern educated people have a clear understanding of illnesses and their causes, they are difficult to pinpoint without carefully collecting data from 100s of cases and meticulous experimentation.
That was the world of the medieval doctor, even if you were well meaning and intelligent it might simply not be possible for you to figure out what is happening and how best to treat it. In general your patient and their family would want you to try something and when they die, as everyone will eventually, they will be consoled by the fact it was their time and they are with God now. In this context OP comic makes more sense.
Ypu describe it as the exact opposite to what it was. Your community simply would not scam you, it was far more reliable that going to somebody you don't know certified by people that nobody you know knows.
>reddit spacing
>bitching about herbs and chiropractors
checks out
Galen...
more like GAYlen
We have a clear understanding of diseases.
Germanische heilkunde explains it perfectly.
Natural healers and conventionel medicine don't know the root cause of disease. That is why their methods don't work all the time
They're still like this, OP.
Find me a modern doctor whose patients don't all eventually die despite his care. Like, just find me even a single patient in the whole world whose life was truly saved and will go on living forever through medical care. Oh, you can't?
thread
The Queen
I only need one doctor to get eternal life, and his name is Jesus Christ.
Based. Came here to post something similar.
You'd be surprised. They didn't know a lot of things we take for granted now but that doesn't mean they were stupid. This is what a Medieval surgeon did for Henry V.
No.
Because if you fucked up that much they'd kill you too.
They were actually proto-fedora tippers, incredibly eager to prove to the unwashed masses that, actually, the latest malaise had a perfectly natural explanation (even if it was ridiculous) instead of a paranormal one. A medieval doctor was capable of about what you'd expect; he could treat a broken limb or gash about as well as any modern doctor could, and might even have some opium for the pain, but treating disease was a 50/50 thing and the best they could do was some light treatment to help you keep up your strength. Some premodern doctors were idiots, others did what little they could. Every now-and-again you'll even read about one that questioned bloodletting.
You gotta start somewhere.
And then they burn the body because they know it's the only way to keep other people from getting sick for some reason, they don't know why but it does
Absolutely not.
This small documentary shows the surgical procedure that Henry V was undertaken after getting an arrowhead stuck to his head. The Doctor had used honey as a natural antibiotic to perform the removal, annotated everything about the case and hand-crafted a surgical tool to get it out.
In general they had a good knowledge of surgery passed on from the Romans, but when it came to the causes and treatment of diseases they were essentially using pseudo-science and herbal remedies.
I remember watching the Yale University lectures on the early middle ages, one of the later episodes. The professor went on a tangent about how just because the theories doctors in medicine operated under were later proven to be incorrect, doesn't mean that they were useless. He went on about how early doctors were following the greek theories on the four humors, and how that focus on the humors made them pretty adapt at finding diseases of the bladder and many infections of that area. Something they never would've bothered looking at if they didn't believe in the humor shit. Doctors would commonly take urine samples and inspect the urine in a flask, and like, be able to deduce many problems by the discoloration or the stuff floating in there. The stethoscope of the time was literally a flask for storing urine, and in old drawings of the time doctors were depicted holding a flask of urine up to the light.
So while in this instance the humor theory on disease was wrong, being under that axiom still allowed them to make progress in certain areas. I think fedoras would do well to remember that.
>the humor theory on disease was wrong
well germ theory has it's detractors too
https://biomedres.us/pdfs/BJSTR.MS.ID.001127.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354131199_Germs_Can_Not_Do_Not_Cause_Dis-ease_The_germ_theory_of_disease_causation_is_a_Fraud
https://enviromedica.com/blogs/news/germ-theory
>We saturate our livestock with antibiotics, and therefore we consume antibiotics in our food. We routinely treat with antibiotics for everything from ear infections to common colds. A strong case is now being built, to show how the current epidemic in inflammatory diseases stems from our long-standing war on germs. We are experiencing a rise in allergies, asthma, and inflammatory bowel conditions that were not present before the 1800’s. We are also experiencing a dramatic increase in dozens of autoimmune conditions. These inflammatory disorders remain rare in regions where people have more contact with soil, and are not consuming processed foods. 6
anyways
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2629169/
"For Chinese medicine there is no documentary evidence, and very little evidence of any kind, before early second century bc. That is not to say that medicine begins in this period, merely that evidence before the Han period cannot be safely reconstructed: in view of the disturbed political conditions, this is unsurprising. The first published translation of the earlier part of the Nei Ching (Neijing) remains useful. Its content is the basis of exposition in many secondary works on Chinese medicine.4 Although the text of this monumental Classic of internal medicine is difficult and uncertain and its date disputed, the general content, in many respects already clear, can be supplemented and reconstructed from later recensions and interpretations, such as that of the Ming period; also by medical texts found in tombs of the second century bc (the Mawangdui tombs)."
>We are experiencing a rise in allergies, asthma, and inflammatory bowel conditions that were not present before the 1800’s. We are also experiencing a dramatic increase in dozens of autoimmune conditions. These inflammatory disorders remain rare in regions where people have more contact with soil, and are not consuming processed foods. 6
This seems like more of an immune system problem they a germ/bacteria one.
What a retarded paper, it's just claiming that propensity for disease is also based on things like environment and genetics, when nobody ever claimed otherwise
I mean historically if you had issues with bowel inflammation and infection or food allergies or asthma, you just died pretty much.
We keep people alive today that 500 years ago would have just died from their conditions.
They thought smelling bad smells led to disease and good smells led to healthy. Plague doctor mask “beaks” were stuffed with flowers. A case of taking the wrong implication from the evidence provided (being around decaying meat, pus, shit, etc. makes you sick) but they weren’t that far off. Also it varied doctor to doctor of course
Necessary Link:
obviously not. medieval doctors (the good ones) are decent at certain things and had decently working herbal remedies. They also have fairly well known medicinal canons spread throughout monasteries and places of learning, so you would probably be exposed as a quack. but as with any premodern medicine, theres only so much you can do without antibiotics, sterile equipment, and germ theory.
premodern peoples' only notion of infection and germs are literally things that looks or smell disgusting, you cant really blame them for getting fucked by the plague.
All doctors before the mid 19th century were shit, but I don't blame them. I'd like to see how many lives a modern doctor could save if he was forced to work with a medieval tool kit.
more like the LARP ages
No. A medieval doctor was just an educated person. He rarely did operations. That's why your PhD makes you a doctor. The person prescribing mint would've been an apothecary and probably a local (i.e. some woman or a midwife) and the person doing surgery would've been a barber.
Besides, even modern doctors become baffled and retarded when something beyond their knowledge reaches them. Just look at COVID lol.
>shut down the entire world for a flu that kills old people
>7 doses of vaccine and it still doesn't work