Medicine Timeline

The Timeline of Medicine

“At every church they dug deep pits down to the water level; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit; they then took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese.” History Todays’ article “Debating Death and Disease” by John Henderson quotes a chronicler from Florence, Marco di Coppo Stefani. This was the unfortunate situation during the medieval ages when diseases swept through Europe, baffling doctors, and medieval medical theory. The medical field has seen many advances over the centuries, and the practice has progressed

Whereas the medical practices used in the middle ages could be considered effective, it is more favorable to practice medicine in modern times due to the overwhelming advances in the medical field, making it a vastly more efficient and progressive system. The medicine during the middle ages/dark ages, was very similar to the name of its time period, dark. Superstition ruled the practice, and lack of education amongst people caused a lack of trust in doctors. Now society accepts the idea of science, which has lead to technological advances beyond belief, such as vaccinations, antibiotics, and improved surgery techniques. Due to these advancements as well as trust in doctors it can be plainly seen that practicing medicine in the Middle Ages would be a less

Most significantly, the world is very unified when it comes to health, if an epidemic breaks out somewhere, nations tend to send help to try to treat it. Sheri Fink, a reporter for the New York Times, describes the intensive effort to combat the recent Ebola outbreak in Africa, citing that, “The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked with multinational teams led by the World Health Organization in more than a dozen unaffected African countries to help prevent the disease from spreading further.” The most interesting portion of this quote is the idea that the world has so many different teams and organizations working to keep the population healthy. There is definitely a large emphasis on health in the modern time frame, which almost always leads to more advancements, and a healthier society. However, perhaps the most important advancement of modern science as a whole, is trust in it. Ray Spangenburg, a writer for the History of Science, summarizes the sudden acceptance of the ideas of science as the modern days begin to approach, he finds that after the many “Triumphs of science fanned the growing belief that science and reason could indeed be brought to bear to solve all of humanity’s most vexing problems.” This highlights a significant shift