The Impact of the Renaissance on Britain Flashcards
All 20 cards in this deck
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? 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.
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.
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 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).
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.