Pre Renaissance Medicine Essay

As is well-known among scholars and common people alike, the Renaissance era brought about great revelations in art, architecture, music, and a number of other things considered part of culture as we know it today; One field that is sadly overlooked, however, is the medical field, yet it is in this field that vast improvements were made. Pre-renaissance, the study of medicine was - in a word - undeveloped, and it could be said that the most apparent line between uncivilized medicine and the kind of care we now have today is observed somewhere in the Renaissance time. Renaissance-era medical services and practices were surprisingly scholarly.

Very different from pre-renaissance medical doctors, there were multitudes of medical specialties

Dissections during this period are a caricature of medical study in the Renaissance. Unlike philosophers of the past that merely debated their beliefs about how the human body worked, Renaissance doctors took a more hands-on approach; that is to say, they were much more experimental in their seek for a greater knowledge of how these things do what they do. Dissections were held in special theaters, very thin and tall, and any individual hoping to study the dissection had better be prepared for an experience that could only be described as extremely uncomfortable; these theaters had less than a foot of space for people to stand in. They were, however, very tall, so multiple levels could typically be observed in which more unfortunate doctors-to-be squeezed in. While the disdainful uncomfortability of these theaters didn’t affect the scholarability in any way, they certainly helped avoid turning dissections into a public spectacle. As for the bodies’ origin, dissections were held typically on deceased prisoners from the gallows. The first dissection theaters sprouted up in Italy - the shows of which typically lasted two weeks