Early Renaissance Medicine

Surgery today is something whose history and presence we take for granted. It is sterile, highly regulated, and only performed by trained, experienced professionals. However, before and during the Middle Ages, surgeries were quite gruesome and almost always led to death, due in large part to our lack of knowledge of how the human body functioned. It was during the Renaissance period (1400s to 1700s) that many European scholars (Michael Servetus, Andrea Cesalpino, Andreas Vesalius, William Harvey, Ambroise Paré, etc.) realized that medical care needed to change. They started to study the human body and soon began to understand previously incomprehensible physiology that they also may have had incorrect beliefs about. One of the biggest discoveries
During the renaissance, however, many doctors/physicians were noticing that bloodletting patients seemed to only make things worse. According to Nancy G. Siraisi, author of Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, “It was the patient who wanted the theory of cure by contraries to be rigidly followed, even if it meant irritating his sore throat; and it was the patient, not the physicians, who was convinced of the virtues of bloodletting in heroic quantities in sickness and in health. What both the local medici and the distant consultant actually recommended were simple, soothing remedies that would bring some comfort and do no harm to a sufferer from bronchitis or a similar complaint”
William Harvey was born in 1578 in Folkestone, Kent. Harvey studied at Caius College, Cambridge before he enrolled at the University of Padua in 1598. At the time when Harvey was a student at Padua, Galileo was a tutor there and there is little doubt that he was highly influenced by the Galilean way of thinking that enthused the university as a whole. Harvey learned about the human body by dissection and anatomical observation. At that time, it was illegal to cut or “disassemble” a human corpse, and William Harvey was going against society when he began to do studies on the cardiovascular system, but he continued to do so and started conducting studies of the cardiovascular system by studying corpses of dogs. This was very effective, and he soon became the first to describe the cardiovascular system correctly and in