Preventive Medicine During the Middle Ages

Human civilizations have always been inflicted with human diseases. Man would look to myths to
define the origins of diseases which came and left dead bodies everywhere. Take for instance, in the
Old Testament located in the Holy Bible. The God of the Hebrews sent a plague to kill the first born
of Egypt, a mighty city-state south of Israel. This story, along with other ancient myths, were seen as
a punishment from God or gods
In addition, around 430-426 B.C.E, an overwhelming plague (believed to be typhoid fever) took the
lives of one third the population of the Athens city-state including Athenian leader Pericles. The
ancient historian Thucydides also got the disease and survived it. He would later write about how
the plague destroyed the nearby surroundings.
Renaissance Doctors Try to Understand Diseases
During the European Middle Ages when it came to the use of preventive medicine, its principles
were ignored extensively in spite of the bubonic plague. That plague would ultimately kill millions of
people across the European countryside before the coming of the Age of the Renaissance. And
during the time of the Renaissance, the minds of the enlightened men rediscovered the old concepts
which existed during the Greco-Roman world. The Renaissance physicians began to observe the
relationship between personal contact, disease, natural conditions and the seasons.
Sanitary Laws Come to Society
With the simultaneous development of knowledge inside the medical field, pragmatic prevention was
starting to be exercised. For example, the first sanitary act was passed in England in 1388 to combat
diseases which could ravage entire cities before they run their course. Then in 1433, the first plague
order came about recommending better quarantine and cleaning procedures. In 1518, the first
attempts at notification of an epic disease and the isolation of those people infected with it were
prepared. In the 17th century, England commenced the study of morality statistics.
Unseen Microscopic World Made Visible
The unseen microscopic world was made visible by such scientists Leeuwenhoek, Hooke, Pasteur
and Spallanazani. Dr. Hooke was one of the minds behind the spearheading of the European
Scientific Revolution which had its establishment foundations within Hellenistic and Greek learning.
That learning, in return, was passed along to the Roman and Byzantine world. The scientific
Medieval Islamic world, led by Avicenna, was spreaded into universities all over Medieval Europe,
part in thanks to the role of Roman Catholic scholasticism.
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