History of Medicine
The Rise of Scientific Medicine: The Renaissance

The Renaissance was a great period of intellectual growth and artistic development in Europe. As part of that scientists and thinkers began to shake loose from the traditional views that governed medicine in both the east and the west. The focus of treatments was no longer a divinely ordained natural balance. Knowledge advanced through the scientific method—conducting experiments, collecting observations, reaching conclusions. Information was disseminated by means of an important new technology—printing. The roots of scientific medicine were set.

		The drawing of the human brain is from Vesalius’s book De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543).
Andreas Vesalius is considered the father of the study of anatomy. His book 1543 book De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body) contained beautiful illustrations of the human body.

The scientific method is applied to medicine

In 1543 Andreas Vesalius (1514-64), a professor at the University of Padua, published an exquisitely illustrated anatomy text. With knowledge based on extensive dissection of human cadavers, he presented the first largely accurate description of the human body. Later anatomists at Padua included Gabriele Falloppio (1523-62), who described the female reproductive organs, giving his name to the Fallopian tubes, and Girolamo Fabrizio (1537-1619), who identified the valves of the heart.

Photo ©National Library of Medicine. The woodcut from Vesalius’s book shows an operating table and various surgical instruments used in the16th century.
	Photo ©National Library of Medicine. Ambrose Paré was a 16th century surgeon who got much of his experience on the battlefield. He developed techniques like tying off arteries to prevent patients from bleeding to death. The woodcut shows an artificial leg devised by Paré.

Surgery was practiced mostly by barbers, who used the same tools for both trades. It remained a pretty primitive and extraordinarily painful business in this era. Controversy continued over wound management—was pus good or bad? Cauterization, the burning of a wound to close it, remained the main way to stop bleeding. Most surgeons learned their skills on the battlefield, and the introduction of gunpowder, guns, and cannons made that a much messier place.

A16th-century French surgeon, Ambroise Paré (c. 1510-90), began to instill some order. He translated some of Vesalius’s work into French to make the new anatomical knowledge available to the battlefield surgeons. With extensive battlefield experience himself, he sewed wounds closed rather than cauterizing them to stop the bleeding during amputations. He replaced the boiling oil used to cauterize gunshot wounds with a salve of egg yolk, oil of roses, and turpentine. His treatments were not only more effective but much more humane than those previously used.

Another major figure of this era was Paracelsus (1493-1541), a Swiss alchemist and physician. He believed that specific diseases resulted from specific outside agents and thus called for specific remedies. He pioneered the use of mineral and chemical remedies, including mercury for the treatment of syphilis. He also wrote what was probably the earliest work on occupational medicine, On the Miners' Sickness and Other Diseases of Miners (1567), published some years after his death.

Syphilis was first recorded in Europe in 1494, when an epidemic broke out among French troops beseiging Naples. The fact that the French army included Spanish mercenaries who had taken part in Christopher Columbus’s expeditions to the New World gave rise to the theory that the disease came from the Americas. If that is true—and it remains the subject of heated controversy—then it was part of an exchange in which the Native Americans fared far worse. The diseases that the Europeans introduced to the Western Hemisphere included smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus, which brought the native populations to near extinction.

Images courtesy of the Clendening History of Medicine Library, University of Kansas Medical Center.
Paracelsus believed that illness was caused by outside agents of disease attacking the body, rather than an imbalance of humors. He mixed chemicals to treat sickness.		Syphilis was first identified in Europe in 1494. It quickly spread throughout the continent.

An Italian physician called Girolamo Fracastoro (c. 1478-1553) coined the name syphilis, which was also called the French disease. He also proposed a theory, adopted from classical ideas, that contagious diseases may be spread by tiny "disease seeds" or spores that can travel across great distances. (He knew, though, that syphilis was trasmitted by person-to-person contact.) This theory was influential for several centuries.

During the Renaissance, the seeds of change were sown for science. Medical knowledge grew by leaps and bounds during the next two centuries.