The Beginnings of Change Flashcards
All 54 cards in this deck
Who was Thomas Sydenham?
A 17th-century English physician who took a scientific approach, observing patients closely and classifying diseases; he showed scarlet fever and measles were different diseases.
When was the Royal Society founded, and how did it help medical knowledge?
- It encouraged a scientific approach of experiment and enquiry and shared findings, e.g. Leeuwenhoek's report of 'animalcules'.
How did the printing press help the transmission of medical ideas?
New discoveries could be spread widely and quickly, and every reader of the same text received identical information.
True or false? By 1665 most people had given up the idea that disease had a religious cause.
False. Religious explanations were still common alongside miasma, shown by fasting and prayer being used against the plague.
True or false? Renaissance discoveries about anatomy and physiology changed people's ideas about what caused disease.
False. They improved knowledge of the body but had little relevance to explanations of the cause of disease, which stayed miasma, humours and divine punishment.
What idea were most treatments still based on c1500–c1700?
Balancing the Four Humours — bloodletting, purging and Galen's Theory of Opposites were still used as late as 1700.
What new treatment did Sydenham encourage for ague and malaria?
Cinchona bark (quinine), recently brought from the Americas; it was successful.
Who was Andreas Vesalius and what did he publish?
An anatomist who dissected human bodies and published On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543), improving knowledge of anatomy and undermining Galen's ideas.
True or false? Vesalius's discoveries quickly changed the way patients in England were treated.
False. His work improved knowledge of anatomy, but prevention and treatment still relied on balancing the humours.
What did William Harvey discover about the blood?
That blood circulates around the body, pumped by the heart, and is not constantly made and burned up as Galen claimed.
What methods did William Harvey use in his work?
A scientific approach: dissection, experiment, observation and recording his results.
When did Harvey publish his work on the circulation of the blood?
1628, in An Anatomical Account of the Motion of the Heart and Blood.
True or false? Harvey's discovery of circulation immediately produced effective new treatments.
False. It greatly improved understanding of physiology, but treatments such as bloodletting continued.
What did people in 1665 think caused the Great Plague in London?
Divine action, miasma or astrological influences — the real cause was unknown.
Why were barrels of tar burned in London's streets in 1665?
To purify the air, because people believed the plague was caused by miasma.
What did the Lord Mayor of London order to stop people gathering during the Great Plague?
Theatres were closed (and large gatherings such as fairs banned).
What happened to houses in London where someone caught the plague in 1665?
They were shut up and quarantined for 28 days, marked with a red cross, with a watchman on guard.
What did the Royal Jennerian Society do?
It made smallpox vaccination freely available, so prevention could take place on a wide scale.
What did Edward Jenner develop?
Vaccination against smallpox, using cowpox, which made it possible to prevent people getting smallpox.
How did the public and Parliament show acceptance of Jenner's work?
Parliament gave him a grant, and there was public recognition of the improvement in preventing illness.
True or false? Jenner could explain scientifically why his smallpox vaccination worked.
False. He could not explain how it worked; Pasteur's Germ Theory (1861) later provided the scientific explanation.
What effect did the dissolution of the monasteries (from 1536) have on hospitals in England?
Most hospitals, many of them run by the Church, were shut. Some charity-funded hospitals opened, but numbers stayed below their earlier level until the eighteenth century.
What was a pest house?
A separate building where people with an infectious disease, such as plague, were sent to be cared for away from the healthy.
How were surgeons and apothecaries trained c1500–c1700?
They trained through guilds, rising from apprentice to journeyman to master, and needed a licence to practise once trained.
Which new technology helped William Harvey think of the heart as a pump?
Mechanical water pumps.
How did Harvey's position as a royal physician help his discovery gain acceptance?
As a doctor to King James I, his work had status and publicity, so other doctors were more likely to take it seriously.
By roughly when was Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood being taught in medical schools?
By about 1700, decades after he published it in 1628.
What was smallpox inoculation, used in Britain from the 1720s?
Deliberately infecting a healthy person with matter from a smallpox sore, so they caught a mild case and became immune. It was risky (some died) and costly.
What experiment did Jenner carry out on James Phipps in 1796?
He gave the boy cowpox, then later exposed him to smallpox. Phipps did not catch smallpox, supporting Jenner's idea that cowpox gave protection.
How did Jenner make his findings public in 1798?
The Royal Society refused to publish them, so he paid to publish his own book, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae.
Give one reason some people opposed Jenner's vaccination.
Any one: inoculators feared losing the money they earned; some thought giving people a disease from cows was unnatural; some believed it went against God's will.
What did the French army surgeon Ambroise Paré use on gunshot wounds instead of boiling oil after running out of oil in 1537?
A soothing mixture of egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine; those wounds healed better and with less pain than cauterised ones.
What did Paré use instead of cauterising to stop the bleeding after an amputation?
Ligatures (silk threads) tied round the blood vessels. They were less painful, but slower to use in battle and could introduce infection.
Why did William Harvey dissect cold-blooded animals?
Their hearts beat slowly, so he could watch the movement of the heart and the blood clearly.
Give one reason doctors opposed Vesalius's claim that Galen had made mistakes.
Galen's authority had been accepted for over 1300 years and was supported by the Church, and doctors trained on his books were unwilling to admit he was wrong.
How did Paré's work influence surgery in Britain?
William Clowes, surgeon to Elizabeth I, admired and used his methods and wrote about them in his book Proved Practice (1588).
What was quackery?
The selling of medicines and treatments that had no scientific basis, by untrained 'quack' doctors who were often more interested in profit than the patient's health.
True or false? By c1800 doctors agreed on one proven method of treating each disease.
False. There was no agreed, scientific approach: a patient could get several different opinions, some treatments were proven (e.g. opium for pain), others were tradition (bleeding) or quackery.
Who was John Hunter?
An eighteenth-century surgeon who insisted on careful observation and experiment, raising surgery's status as a science; he trained many surgeons, including Edward Jenner.
How were eighteenth-century hospitals used to train doctors?
Medical schools were attached to hospitals with specialist wards for different diseases, and students followed a medical professor round the wards.
Who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain in the 1720s?
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had seen it used in Turkey and had her own children inoculated.
True or false? Vaccination was safer than inoculation because it could not give the patient smallpox.
True. Jenner used cowpox, a mild disease, whereas inoculation used smallpox matter and could kill the patient.
When did the British government make smallpox vaccination compulsory?
1853 — a significant step, because governments at the time favoured laissez-faire.
When was smallpox declared eradicated from the world?
1980, by the World Health Organisation.
How were Vesalius's anatomy drawings spread in England?
Thomas Geminus, an engraver in London, copied them into Compendiosa (1545), an anatomy book aimed at surgeons. It sold well, and an edition in English followed in 1553.
Give one reason some doctors rejected Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood.
Any one: it contradicted Galen, whose teaching doctors had trusted for centuries; Harvey could not show how blood passed from the arteries into the veins; some did not believe his calculations of how much blood the heart pumped.
When were capillaries first seen, and why did this matter for Harvey's theory?
In 1661, four years after Harvey died, when Marcello Malpighi saw them under a microscope. They showed how blood passes from arteries to veins, filling the gap in Harvey's explanation.
Roughly how many people died in London in the Great Plague of 1665?
About 100,000, roughly one Londoner in every four.
True or false? The Great Fire of London in 1666 ended the plague.
False. The fire burned the City inside the walls, but most plague deaths were in the poor districts outside them, which did not burn; plague was already declining.
What was the 'royal touch'?
The traditional belief that being touched by the monarch could cure scrofula, a disease of the glands known as 'the king's evil'. Charles II touched many thousands of sufferers.
How were the new hospitals of the eighteenth century paid for?
By wealthy donors (Thomas Guy's fortune paid for Guy's Hospital in London, which opened in 1726) or by subscription, with many local supporters paying regular sums, as at the Westminster Infirmary (1719).
What did John Hunter do in 1785 instead of amputating a patient's leg?
He treated a swollen artery behind the knee (an aneurysm) by tying off the artery higher up, so blood found another route and the leg was saved.
Where does the word 'vaccination' come from?
From vacca, Latin for cow, because the method used cowpox, which Jenner called variolae vaccinae ('smallpox of the cow').
How did a failed London trial of vaccination help Jenner's opponents?
At the London Smallpox Hospital, William Woodville and George Pearson used cowpox matter contaminated with smallpox, so patients fell ill and one died, which critics used as evidence that vaccination was dangerous.