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| Credit: https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/tag/history+of+medicine |
- For the two centuries before the Black Death, there had been a great medical school at Salerno in Italy. It trained women doctors as well as men.
- Doctors were described as wealthy people. They wore red or purple gowns. They had belts of silver thread. Their hoods were furred. They had embroidered gloves. If they rode to visit a patient. they would wear golden spurs. A servant went with them.
- Quacks such as the Triacleurs who used treacle as a cure, visited fairs and markets. They sold useless pills and ointments and potions.
- Cures were a mixture of common sense and superstition. Doctors set broken bones and pulled out rotten teeth. They made anaesthetics from opium and hemlock and used herbs such as dock for swollen glands and rue for nose bleeds. They took cataracts off eyes with a silver needle. A mixture of oil, vinegar and sulphur was used to treat toothache and ground peony root with oil of roses was a treatment for headaches. They applied a truss for a hernia. For ringworm they recommended washing the scalp with a boy's urine and for gout, a plaster of goat dung mixed with rosemary and honey was applied. To stop the pockmarks in a smallpox patient, they wrapped the patient in red cloth in a bed with red hangings.
- People thought that a cause of disease was too much blood in the body. So doctors put leeches on the sick person's body. The leeches fastened themselves on to the skin with their teeth and sucked out blood. This is why doctors were sometimes called leeches.
- Sick people went on visits to shrines. Sometimes the sick were carried long distances to places that were thought of as sacred.
- Often a sick child was weighed and the same weight of gold or silver was given to a shrine if the child recovered.
- Today we know that the plague is caused by bacteria. These organisms are so small you cannot see them without a microscope. People in the Middle Ages did not have microscopes. The microscope was not invented until about 1590. And bacteria were not discovered until about 1680. Even then another hundred years went by before it was suggested that bacteria might cause disease. But most scientists thought disease produced bacteria instead of the other way around. The plague disease had different forms. This confused medieval people even more. Their lack of scientific knowledge made them come up with other causes for the Black Death.
