[Music] foreign when you think Renaissance Michelangelo statues boring school work well yes you're right about the statues and paintings I mean here's some Renaissance art hmm compare that to their medieval predecessors yeah what can I say I suppose they're stylized colorful mostly religious oh look at that fellow back to the Renaissance art can you see it's a far higher degree of quality of expertise to reach the standard artists had to really examine the human form devote themselves professionally to Excellence they studied and in 15th century Italy they studied the rediscovered works of the ancient Greeks and Romans think Plato and Aristotle not Hippocrates and Galen so started a rebirth of creativity and exploration the likes of which had not been seen in Europe since classical Antiquity it began with beautiful art but the search for Perfection did not stop there significant developments took place in multiple branches of learning at this time one discipline May medicine yes this is a video on medicine was swept along with these seismic shifts in thinking though perhaps swept is too generous a word maybe let's try gently prodded in the right direction slowly over many years consider the fields of physics astronomy and Mathematics by 1687 they had codified the laws that made the universe an equivalent Eureka moment in medicine I would say recognizing that a cause of disease is germs would take almost another 200 years nevertheless the 16th and 17th centuries encompassing the Tudor and Stewart dynasties can be viewed in the history of medicine as a time of Renaissance where questioning Minds began to challenge old assumptions slowly what I'm saying is a medieval peasant Zapped to the 17th century might not notice much difference in the practice of medicine but changes were afoot the Renaissance created a positive feedback loop where progress fueled more progress Whenever there was a discovery invention or sea change in thinking that breakthrough would Aid further progress in other fields as well as their own a virtuous cycle let's see where does a circle begin Hmm this is tough let's go with the thinkers their questioning Minds were the true Antichrist for the Catholic church it's no coincidence that protestantism appeared at this time they challenged Catholic dogma on sin the afterlife and people's relationship with God and for an institution that claims to speak for God a challenge to any one part of its Doctrine was a challenge to all of it with the authority of the church slipping these new thinkers today referred to as humanists were able to escape the persecution and torture their ideas would have resulted in only a few decades before humanists were characterized by a love of learning a new interest in classical Scholars and the belief that human beings could make up their own minds they began to influence each other and pass on their principles to younger Generations progress fueling progress the role of education and schools when it had been dominated by the church had mostly been to produce a God-fearing literate clergy and aristocracy no thought given to the other 90 of the population but with the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VII the number of schools began to grow substantially expanding both education's accessibility and the curriculums they taught with more focus on literature and the Arts collectively called the humanities ooh like their name some of those subjects developing into the Sciences schools now saw their role as educating the Future Leaders of society one of the main reasons why the men who served Elizabeth the first were so able and why there was such a flourishing of intellectual and scientific life in Britain at that time was the Colossal shift in the way in which those leaders had been educated say it with me progress fueling progress this new learning helped increase the levels of literacy throughout the continent it meant new ideas could spread further and faster even faster still because of the printing press by the start of the 16th century there were already hundreds of printing presses across Europe This was big this was mass communication mechanical movable type printing other than resulting in fewer inconsistencies and taking publishing out of the hands of the church meant there was a much wider variety of subjects that could be written about progress fueling progress okay I'll stop other inventions enabled new ways the world around us could be observed and measured Piston Pumps spring driven clocks telescopes microscopes barometers and thermometers to Name six humanism is an approach to thinking was just the beginning many more methods and philosophies were developed during this time you're probably familiar with a great many individuals as the Renaissance even if only by name Da Vinci Erasmus Copernicus Galileo and bacon heard of them now named some in medicine me neither so let's look at them here we go Thomas Sydenham an English physician who advanced the use of scientific processes in medicine he refused to rely on what the medical books of his time said instead he closely observed the symptoms of his patients he believed diseases had external causes and were not the result of unbalanced humors remember them he published his own work medical observations in 1676 which became a standard textbook of medicine for two centuries earning him the nickname the English Hippocrates okay next one Andreas vaselius he made huge advances in the understanding of anatomy he conducted dissections himself even though he was a physician not a lowly surgeon this first-hand experience allowed him to identify around 300 mistakes the Roman physician Galen had made 1300 years before his seven-volume book Fabrica was nothing short of a new way of doing medicine the first in over a thousand years whilst his individual significance should not be underestimated please remember he was able to make these discoveries but because among other reasons one the Catholic church had had to relent on the prohibition of dissections to the printing press allowed his ideas to be widely disseminated and three Renaissance artists could skillfully replicate the delicate features of the body on paper our best feeling progress last one William Harvey a student of the students of visalius he practiced vivisection not dissection which is the cutting open of dead bodies but vivisection The Cutting open of live ones only in animals of course particularly cold-blooded creatures who would stay alive longer this allowed him to observe the circulatory system in action something you can't see in a dead body it led him to conclude that the arterial and venous blood vessels form a single connected system and that the heart acted as a pump a comparison only possible because the Piston pump had recently been invented August feeling progress his work was another huge leap forward in anatomy but it had little immediate effect on Medical Treatments because knowing that the heart pumps blood doesn't really have any practical applications unlike for example the discovery in 1901 that there are different blood groups which very quickly led to Safe blood transfusions there are other individuals I'd like to talk about but suffice to say they all contributed a little more to Humanity's Collective wisdom more than that in 166 60. the first scientific institution the Royal Society was founded now scientists could talk to each other about their discoveries and share ideas the Royal Society also published the world's first scientific journal philosophical transactions which is still around today the journal provided a vitally important platform from which scientists could share their work in plain English and contributed to a spread in medical ideas for example lavenhoek a largely self-taught Dutch scientist and one of those individuals I'd wanted to talk about earlier he had no I haven't time bacteria he discovered bacteria but my point is his findings only became widely known thanks to the Royal Society again just like with Harvey's work on the heart the discovery of bacteria what lavenhook called animal keos did not lead to any immediate applications and that should be our main takeaway from the Renaissance the progress made was more theoretical than practical most people at the time didn't even know they were living through a Renaissance as such if we were to visit the types of healers to be found in this period and the treatments they offered they would not differ too far from those of centuries earlier Physicians still trained at universities mainly from textbooks not from practical experience despite the pioneering work of men like visalius but at least the accessibility and quality of those textbooks were improving nevertheless in practice even if they knew better most Physicians stuck to the old methods before humors bleeding purging and so on that's because they had to earn a living and non-specialists in other words most people still believed in the old ways and were suspicious of unfamiliar new ideas this point applies just as much today as it did then by the way scientific and medical advantages are important but so is educating the general population so they trust them Harvey himself said that after he published his discovery on the heart fewer patients came to see him because they thought him mad surgeons and apostaries were still not University educated but the development of the guild system meant lengthy apprenticeships were required to qualify as a fully trained Master there were also some new techniques developed in surgery in response to the new ways people found to kill each other unsurprisingly most people were still cared for at home home was where women were expected to look after the sick actors midwives grow herbs and mixed remedies and if struggling financially to go out and sell those remedies this was risky however as there was often a danger that they might be accused of Witchcraft whilst Herbal Remedies either purchased or made at home had been used for centuries greater contact with the new world allowed for the use of new ingredients apothecaries sold plants like Sarsaparilla which was used to treat the great pops and ipikachuana used to cure dysentery some of these ingredients actually worked synchona bark from Peru for instance was effective against malaria as long as the Patient continued to keep taking it for a few weeks after the symptoms subsided which many tragically did not the growth in alchemy the Forerunner of chemistry inspired some to search for chemical treatments for illnesses use using substances like antimony and Mercury again some of these could help Mercury does kill bacteria but it also often kills the patient so not necessarily progress but certainly evidence of experimentation and an openness to new ideas which were not present in medieval times another new idea not correct but new at any rate was transference people would try to rub objects on themselves to transfer the disease onto that object one popular theory was you could get rid of warts by rubbing them with an onion ultimately though preventing disease was still considered the best way to avoid dying from it for that reason cleanliness was considered very important though public baths had become less fashionable in Britain since the arrival of the great pox today known as syphilis possibly picked up after the Europeans arrival in the new world syphilis was an infectious Insidious disease that caused plainly visible rashes sores and pustules all over the body and in around a third of cases led to ferocious deformities bath houses which had been as popular in medieval Britain as it had in Roman times were closed down there had been places where both men and women washed communally it was a social occasion of notes to go to the baths and with people there in various stages of undress it would also often be a discrete Center of sexual activity and prostitution many bath houses doubled as brothels by closing them down people took the wrong lesson they thought that syphilis was spread by bathing rather than sex outbreaks of disease continue to be a common part of life during this period there were influencer epidemics in 1510 and 1557 a smallpox won in 1562 followed the next year by an outbreak of Bubonic plague the same disease as the Black Death it returned again in 1593 and 1625 but the biggest occurrence in this period was in 1665 the Great Plague you know this one it's the one with those strange looking bird doctors which we'll get to and where the nursery rhyme ring around the Roses came from except it didn't though statistical data from the time is sketchy it's likely at least a hundred thousand people died in London about a quarter of the population most people blame the same things for the Great Plague in 1665 as their ancestors had done during the black death in 1348 though the popularity of each idea had shifted by the latter part of the 17th century belief in the four humors was finally waning additionally most people now recognized that God did not punish Sinners with diseases though zealots still argued he did astrology was likewise not as widely held a belief instead the most popular theory was connected to the squalor many people lived in London in 1665 was six times the size it had been in 1348. the city was a sprawling stinking mess slums had Spilled Out beyond the city walls into the surrounding counties no single Authority was responsible or interested in maintaining sanitation or infrastructure the cobbled streets slippery with the filth of animal droppings rubbish and slops thrown out of the houses stank to high heaven perhaps unsurprisingly therefore the most popular theory for the cause of the play was that it was spread by bad or corrupt air otherwise called miasma regardless of the exact cause however most people could see that once someone had it being in close proximity to them meant you were likely to catch it also and so many who could chose to run away though many more did not have the opportunity to do so early on in the epidemic Ships coming from overseas were forced to isolate for 40 days hence the word quarantine it's an example of the biggest contrast between the black death and the Great Plague government intervention despite a slow start authority figures like the king and the mayor were far more active in their attempts to limit the spread of the disease than their predecessors had been public meetings fairs and large funerals were banned theaters were closed and streets and alleys were regularly swept wardens were appointed to monitor to the spread of the disease and if a household was infected the inhabitants were either taken to a pest house or forced to remain behind their Red Cross painted doors every day carts would travel through the city to collect the bodies of the dead now not all of these interventions were effective for instance a lot of energy was channeled into having fires burning on every street to master bad smells which of course made no difference and the order to kill any dogs cats or pigeons seen on the street probably had the adverse effect of increasing the numbers of disease-carrying rats because spoiler alert the disease was spread by Rats the fleas on those rats carried the bacterium yasinia pestis of course people at the time did not know that the microbe was only identified in 1894 and only confirmed as the culprit behind the plague in 2010 20 2010 wow if you did catch the disease there wasn't much anyone could do for you most treatments were preventative like praying quarantining smoking tobacco or carrying a pomanda other than ideas like Herbal Remedies transference or sweating there was not much that could be done you either survived or more likely died this Stark reality created a panic that allowed charlatans known as quack doctors to profit by selling ineffective and often dangerous miracle cures like plague water to people desperate enough to try them now as for the plague doctors their extraordinary outfits were designed to prevent the disease from reaching the man inside it whilst The bird-like Mask draws the eye this was the least effective part of the costume the protruding Beak was Hollow and held sweet smelling herbs which were thought to block the miasma oh you knew that already well how about this the bird-like appearance of the Mask was intentionally designed that way to tempt the disease out of the victim as many thought there was a link between birds and Illness but outside of being a barrier between the doctor and the patient these features were redundant rather the long leather robes heavy gloves and handheld batons meant Dr beak as these Physicians were sometimes called were better protect from the disease than most this outfit that most school children would recognize was not as common on the Streets of London as you might think there was actually very little evidence that anyone wore them in real plague outbreaks most of the evidence we have of them come from satirical writings and images similar to today's political cartoons but they did exist and they demonstrate the doctors by the latter half of the 17th century were developing firmer ideas about how diseases could be contagious it also shows that more doctors were working in public capacities hired to care for the health of entire communities not just for individual wealthy patients there were many medical breakthroughs in the 16th and 17th centuries but what there wasn't were many practical applications arising from those breakthroughs though they certainly facilitated progress in later centuries also noteworthy was the significance of the centralization of power in England and Scotland and other nation-states of Europe as Nations became more unified and lawful more complex institutions and organizations were able to Amish and these Advance the understanding and practice of medicine excellent news for future Generations though probably of little Comfort to those living at the time foreign [Music]