Medicine through time

Galen was a greek physician. He unfortunatley was wrong about many things such as; believing the liver made the blood and the body used it up like fuel and he also thought that the jaw had 2 bones. As the church had alot of power at the time, it was illegal to dissect human corpses as it was thought the body had to be intact to go to heaven. Anyway, because of this, Galen had no choice but to dissect animals such as monkeys. His theories went wrong when he decided to apply the knowledge he had about the animal body to the human body. As they work differently, this meant all of his theories were wrong.

Andreas Vesalius was the first person to challenge Galen. Nobody had done this before as 'if you went against Galen, you went against the Church' (which was illegal). At first, many people refused to believe that Galen was wrong as he was heavily influenced by the church (most people were christian) they did not want to think that the church was wrong. This started to change when Vesalius proved some of Galens theories wrong. He knew the jaw only had 1 bone and not 2. Over time, more and more people started to trust Vesaliuse's theories.

Ambroise Pare was most well-known for creating prosthetic limbs and ligatures. He made the prosthetics with springs and catches, this meant people with missing limbs could lead a fairly normal life. One day, Pare ran out of oil for cauterisation so he decided to make a cream with egg, rose oil and turpentine to soothe the wound. He would first sew the wound up, then, he would apply the cream to help heal the wound and releive pain.

The Black Death arrived in Britain in 1346. It came over from foreign countries…