Q1 How useful is the source Practice Questions: Health & the People

Study Source A below, then answer the question.

Source A: From a handbook of practice written in about 1400 by an English physician, to instruct students who were training in medicine at a university.

Written for practice: not a real historical source.

When you are called to a patient, first ask on what day and at what hour the sickness began, for the position of the planets at that time will guide you. Inspect the urine against the chart and consider its colour, its thickness and its smell. If the patient is hot and red, the blood is in excess and you must bleed him from the vein that the almanac allows for that season. Remember what the ancient authorities teach: health is the balance of the four humours. Tell the patient also to confess his sins, for no remedy succeeds without God's help.

Study Source A below, then answer the question.

Source A: From a pamphlet published in London in 1806 by a doctor who earned much of his income from inoculating patients against smallpox. It was written to persuade parents not to accept the new vaccination.

Written for practice: not a real historical source.

Eight years have passed since the gentleman of Gloucestershire told us that matter taken from a cow's udder will guard a child against the smallpox. He cannot tell us how it works, only that it does. I have heard of children vaccinated who took the smallpox within the year, and of others left covered in sores from the beast's disease. Inoculation with the smallpox itself has protected the families of this city for generations, and is carried out by respectable men. Yet Parliament has handed this man £10,000 of the public's money. Let no parent risk putting the filth of an animal into a healthy child.

Study Source A below, then answer the question.

Source A: From a letter sent in 1849 to a British medical journal by a hospital surgeon who had used chloroform in his own operations. The journal was read by other surgeons and physicians.

Written for practice: not a real historical source.

I have now given chloroform to more than sixty patients, and I grant freely that the screaming which once filled our operating theatres has ceased. Yet I cannot be easy in my mind. Only last year a healthy girl of fifteen died in County Durham within minutes of taking a few drops for the drawing of a toenail. We cannot measure the dose with any certainty, and the strongest patients seem to be in the greatest danger. Worse, now that we may take our time, my colleagues cut deeper into the body, and a greater number of their patients are carried off afterwards by infection of the wound.

Study Source A below, then answer the question.

Source A: From a memorandum written in 1943 by an official at a British government ministry, for the ministers responsible for supplying the armed forces.

Written for practice: not a real historical source.

The Oxford team's work has shown beyond doubt that penicillin cures infected wounds, yet our firms are still growing the mould in milk churns and hospital bedpans. Output here is counted in a few hundred doses a month, and surgeons at the front are rationed to the worst cases. The American companies, backed by their government since they entered the war, are now growing it in great tanks and will shortly make enough for every Allied casualty. We must therefore expect to buy back from America a drug first noticed in a London laboratory. Ministers should press for British production to be expanded before the invasion of Europe.

Study Source A below, then answer the question.

Source A: From a report written by an official sent by a bishop to inspect a hospital in an English town, 1356. He had been sent to check that the hospital's gifts of land and money were being used as its founder had intended.

Written for practice: not a real historical source.

We found within the hospital twelve poor and sick folk, as the founder ordained, each lying in a clean bed. The brothers and sisters rise in the night for their prayers, and mass is said each day in the chapel beside the beds, so that the sick may hear it and be comforted. They wash the sick, give them bread, ale and pottage, and the sister who keeps the garden prepares herbs for them. No physician attends here. Those sick of leprosy, and women with child, are not received. Since the great pestilence our rents are much decayed, and the master complains he can scarce feed those he has.