Advances in Medicine from the Scientific Revolution Onwards until the 19th Century

       The Scientific Revolution was a time when many branches of science developed and became more modernized in a relatively short amount of time. While many of these ideas had been changing and developing for centuries beforehand and only saw a rapid evolution in the Scientific Revolution, medicine had been static almost since its creation. Many ideas that had been established early on in the field of medicine had been accepted as fact and nothing was ever done to prove these notions as either correct or incorrect. The collective teachings of Aristotle and Galen comprised the basics of the human knowledge on the subject of medicine. Much of what they taught relied on their limited understanding of logic, physics, and ethics. The four elements and the planets were thought to control the inner workings of the human body. This type of inability and unwillingness to change the established philosophies made it difficult for advances to come about in the field of medicine. Things did not begin to change until the Scientific Revolution. There were quite a few catalysts that called for the need for advances to be made. New diseases were arising, and since older medicinal properties did not have any information on these illnesses, medicine had to change to accommodate for the new ideas. The reason that medical theory in the Scientific Revolution advanced rapidly was because it broke away from its ancient roots of simply maintaining overall health in the body and became more focused on the prevention and curing of diseases. 

            Aelius “Galen” Galenus was a Greek physician, anatomist, and physiologist. Many of his ideas were presented into the medical community and remained intact for centuries after him. Many of his ideas were based off of Aristotelian methods and his natural philosophy. Both scientists believed that the body’s overall health could be gauged by knowing the levels of four of the humours that were thought to be present in every living human being. These humours were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. If a person’s levels were off, they were said to have been sick and given the basic medicine that was given to everyone at the time. Galen and Aristotle analyzed the body and the world around them in terms of four basic elements, those of air, earth, fire, and water. Aristotle declared that only four elements existed: “Fire, air, water and earth. All matter is made up of these four elements and matter had four properties: hot, cold, dry and wet" (“History of Chemistry”). These ideas were still being relied on up until the Scientific Revolution. It is terribly difficult to achieve much in medicine when only four elements are thought to exist. A great change had to come about in order to make medicine more modernized.

            In the past, overall health was maintained by keeping the humours of the body at regulation levels. This practice all but ceased to exist as soon as new diseases began to arise. One of the first of such new diseases was syphilis. None of the ancient texts on which the medical community had been basing their knowledge off of had any information of such a disease as syphilis. The types of medicines that were available to people in those times did nothing to combat syphilis. Something new had to be created if the human population was not to be decimated by an outbreak of a terrible disease. The name for syphilis was made in a poem by Girolamo Francastoro. This shows how little the medical community knew about what caused diseases. There were no scientific classifications for diseases. With the Scientific Revolution came the advent of a revolution in medical thought and practice.

            The arrival to the New World brought with it even more new disease. But there were also plants that had medicinal properties and were used to make new medicines. Diseases were given to explorers from people who were native to the New World, and when the explorers returned to Europe, their disease was transferred to the rest of the populous. These new diseases screamed for new ideas to arise in medicine because if they did not, an entire population may have been wiped out by a single virus. Specialized doctors were needed; doctors who learned specific information of one disease. This was the beginning of structured medicine, one of the key factors to modern medicine.