Summary: How Did Medicine Evolve In The Renaissance

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How did Medicine Evolve in the Renaissance?

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By
Jack Tolmie

To Mr. Coffing

Medicine is always changing and evolving to match the environment of the time. Pandemics come and go, and military technology rapidly gets more efficient at killing, but medicinal practice is always there to combat the worst from all of them. Medicine has come a long way from the early ages of primitive spices like cinnamon to help the most basic sicknesses to the advanced. Now we have inventions like x-ray to diagnose internal injuries and radio chemo therapy to combat cancer. For medicine to become so advanced somewhere along the way things had to change in every aspect of the way people think about medicine and the way it was practiced. …show more content…

Paracelsus was not born in Italy but instead moved there to learn of the new renaissance practices. He was one of the first physicians to remove a disease from a soldiers leg without just amputating it; unheard of before the discovery. Upset at the fact that medicine technology was stuck in a rut at the time, with university professors teaching the same traditional methods over and over again, Paracelsus went out on his own and gained the experience the universities were not teaching. “Modern medicine can be traced back to Paracelsus, who believed that physicians should try new things on the sick, rather than repeating the same, tired, textbook cures, concentrating upon healing rather than seeking riches.”(Explorable Oskar Blakstad) A man very focused on the discovery of why things were the way that they were he came across several diseases such as Syphilis which he eventually cured with mercury. He later moved from Italy back to his homeland of Switzerland where he practiced his new findings in a more conservative medical environment. Paracelsus medical theories were based upon four pillars of philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and the virtue of the physician. The pillars that Paracelsus came up with show the determination he had to be a successful physician in a time of such dramatic

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