Author: Rachel Harvey

Key Question 4. Advances in Medical Knowledge c.500-present day

Medieval / (Up to 1500ish)	Early Modern / 1500-1800 ish!	Modern / 1800 to the present day
Key Ideas: / (From Ancient Greece and Rome) Hippocrates: The Theory of the Four Humours (4 Humours in the body and if they were balanced you were healthy). Galen continued Hippocrates ideas. Also said dissection was important and improved knowledge of anatomy. Listened to a patient’s pulse (still done today) These ideas dominated into Medieval times...about 1400 years! / Alchemy: Early chemistry, trying to turn base metals into gold and find an ‘Elixir of Life’ to make you live forever! / Astrology: Zodiac Chart/Star signs. Studied position of the stars before carrying out certain operations or bleeding. / Church: Set up universities to study medicine from about 1200 but didn’t want Galen’s ideas challenged.	Renaissance… literally means rebirth (of interest in the ideas of Ancient Greece and Rome) / A time of questioning of old ideas! / Andreas Vesalius: Fabric of the Human Body 1543 Changed knowledge by correcting Galen on about 200 points (incl. human jaw bone and ‘no holes in the septum of the heart’) / Ambroise Pare: Works on Surgery 1575. Developed ointment (rose oil, turpentine, egg yolk) to treat gunshot wounds instead of cauterising oil, and tied blood vessels with ligatures instead of cauterising them. / William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart, 1628, fully explained circulation of the blood.	Louis Pasteur: Germ Theory 1861. First person to establish link between germs and disease / (Robert Koch: Science of Bacteriology. Discovered germs which caused TB (1883), cholera (1884) and later plague, pneumonia, blood poisoning etc. Dyes discovered to stain and then photograph germs. Paul Ehrlich was one of his students who improved his knowledge and developed first ‘Magic Bullet’. / New scientific knowledge could cure disease! / Wilhelm Rontgen: X-Rays 1895. (paved the way for ultrasound, MRI and PET and CT scans. / Watson and Crick: Discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Paved the way for the fight against genetic diseases.