UNIVERSITATEA TITU MAIORESCU

FACULTATEA DE MEDICINA DENTARA

Specializarea Medicina Dentara

Renaissance medicine
Coordonator stiintific:
As. Univ. Radu Mirela
Student: Sima Victoria

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
methodconducting experiments, collecting
observations, reaching conclusions.
Information was disseminated by means of an
important new technologyprinting. The
roots of scientific medicine were set.

Andreas Vesalius is considered

the father of the study of anatomy.
In 1543 Andreas Vesalius (15141564), a professor at the University
of Padua, published an illustrated
anatomy text. With knowledge
based on extensive dissection of
human cadavers, he presented the
first largely accurate description of
the human body.

Vesalius' work on the vascular and circulatory

systems was his greatest contribution to the
complex and modern medicine. Vesalius published
in the second edition that the septum was indeed
waterproof, discovering (and naming), the mitral
valve to explain the blood flow. He believed that
the brain and the nervous system are center of
the mind and emotion in contrast to the common
Aristotelian belief that the heart was the center of

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. Cauterization, the
burning of a wound to close it, remained the
main way to stop bleeding. Most surgeons
learned their skills on the battlefield.

A16th-century French surgeon, Ambroise

Par (1510-1590), began to instill some order. He
translated some of Vesaliuss 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.

Pandemics and epidemics during the

Renaissance
During the Renaissance, Europe starting trading with
nations from all over the world. While this was good for
wealth and many people's standards of living, it also exposed
them to pathogens from faraway lands.
TheBlack Death, started off in Asia, and made its way
westward, hitting Western and Mediterranean Europe in
1348. Medical historians believe Italian merchants brought it
to Europe when they fled the fighting in Crimea.
During the Black Death over a period of six years
about one-third of Europe's population perished,
approximately 25 million people. The plague did not just
come and go away for ever. It kept coming back and caused
devastation in several areas right up to the 17th century.

Personal hygiene- during the Renaissance,

bathing remained popular. It was not until after
this period that Europeans viewed water as a
carrier of disease and the Catholic Church
started wondering about the immorality of
public bathing. The Church eventually banned
public bathing in an attempt to stem the spread
of syphilis (which continued to spread).

Diagnosis and treatment of diseases during the

Renaissance
Methods of diagnosis during the early
Renaissance period were not very different from what
occurred during the Middle Ages. Physicians had no idea
how to cure infectious disease. When faced with the
plague or syphilis they did not really know what to do.
Ineffective desperate attempts at treating
diseases also included superstitious rites and magic.
Even the King, Charles II, was asked to help out by
touching sick people in an attempt to cure them of
scrofula. Scrofula was most likely a type of tuberculosis.
Quinine was discovered in the New World and was used
to treat malaria.

During the Renaissance, artists thought

that the only way that they could learn about
the anatomy of the human body was through
dissections. Dissections during the
Renaissance were not approved by the church
due to their beliefs but Leonardo da Vinci
completed dissections in secret.

Leonardo da Vinci was a

famous artist that was born in
1452 and had legendary
drawings of his thoughts, ideas
and discoveries of the human
body. These drawings are
legendary because they are the
basis of common knowledge of
the human body used today.
Leonardo is known for his
paintings such as the Mona
Lisa, The Last Supper and the
Vitruvian Man:
TheProportionsof the Human
Figure, his dissections on
humans is what made his
Vitruvian Man painting
possible.

Leonardo studied the

human body in order to
make an accurate painting of
how he thought the human
body was symmetrical
andproportional. This
painting reflected several of
his theories as to what he
thought the human body
looked and functioned like.
The reason why
Leonardo completed this
type of painting was due to
him along with several other
Renaissance artists wanting
to show how the body parts
functioned.

Leonardo's anatomical
drawings include many
studies of the human
skeleton and its parts, and
studies muscles and
sinews. He studied the
mechanical functions of
the skeleton and the
muscular forces that are
applied to it in a manner
that prefigured the modern
science of biomechanics.
He drew the heart and
vascular system, the sex
organs and other internal
organs, making one of the
first scientific drawings of
a fetus in utero.

As an artist, Leonardo also closely

observed and recorded the effects of age and
of human emotion on the physiology, studying
in particular the effects of rage.
The drawings and notation are far ahead of
their time, and if published, would
undoubtedly have made a major contribution
to medical science.
Without Leonardo da Vinci and his secret
dissections, the discoveries that led to how
each body part functions and how it interacts
with the rest of the body or body parts,
medical advances today would not have been
made.

Bibliography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Vesalius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Renaissance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
www.descopera.ro
www.medica.ro
www.scientia.ro/.../4273-istoria-medicineimedicina-in-sec-xvii.html

Thank you very much for your

attention !