Medicine in the 17th Century

Think about your last visit with a doctor. Chances are, it didn’t look or feel anything like a visit with the doctor in the 1600s. For starters, the doctor would likely have come to your house, as in the case of Argan. Think about these major medical advances of the 17th century…

1628 — English scientist William Harvey publishes An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals, describing how blood is pumped throughout the body by the heart. The book is originally very controversial but eventually becomes the basis for modern research on the heart and blood vessels. Before this, there had been a thousand-year-old belief that blood originated from the liver and flowed until it was absorbed in the lungs!

1656 — Sir Christopher Wren, architect of the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, invents a method of administering drugs intravenously (the precursor to IV’s that are slipped into the arm veins of medical patients) with an animal bladder and an iron quill. Imagine – a ball point pen being stuck into the veins of your arm!

1670 — Anton van Leeuwenhoek refines the microscope invented only 90 years before. He is able to produce about 500 copies in his lifetime.

CLASS ACTIVITY
2008 and beyond? In the last century, we have successfully cloned animals, eradicated many of the deadliest of diseases, implanted fully functional artificial hearts, and created embryonic stem cells which could one day lead to unimaginable medical advances.

• What kind of medical advances do you think we will see in the next hundred years?

• Think of how today’s medical breakthroughs would have looked to someone living in Molière’s day.

• Imagine what medical practices 400 years from now would look to us.

Dr. Purgeon prescribes the following remedies for your aches and pains ...

The following are actual doctor’s orders from the time of Molière and The Imaginary Invalid. “If you would get rid of the chills and sweating, go by night alone to a crossroads, and just as the clock is striking midnight turn round three times and drive a large nail into the ground up to the head. Walk backwards from the nail before the clock has finished the twelfth stroke. The fever will leave you, but will go to the person next to step on the nail.” —English folk belief of the 1600’s Rules for Blood Letting

“The vein above the thumb is good against all fevers.... The vein between the thumb and the forefinger, let blood for the hot headache, for frenzy and madness of wit. Also be ye always well advised, and wary, that ye let no blood, nor open no vein, except the Moon be either in Aries, Cancer, the first half of Libra, the last half of Scorpio, or in Sagittarius, Aquarius, or Pisces...” — Peter Levens, master of arts In Oxford, and student in physick and chirurgery

The Pathway to Health 1664 One author of the time was aware of the ritualistic, even superstitious aspects of the “medicine” of his age: “It lay chiefly in the people deceived, and this was in wearing charms, exorcism, and amulets, to fortify the body with them against the plague, as if the plague was not the hand of God, but a kind of a possession of an evil spirit; and that it was to be kept off with crossings, signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so many knots, and certain words or figures in a triangle or pyramid, thus”

ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A

— Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1665