Modern Medicine Has Its Scientific Roots In The Middle Ages − How The Logic Of Vulture Brain Remedies And Bloodletting Lives On Today

Nothing calls to mind nonsensical treatments and bizarre religious healing rituals as easily as the notion of Dark Age medicine. “The Saturday Night Live” sketchsays it all with its portrayal of a quack doctor who insists on extracting pints of his patients’ blood in a dirty little shop.

“Dark Age medicine” is a useful narrative when it comes to ingrained beliefs about medical progress. It is a period that stands as the abyss from which more enlightened thinkers freed themselves. Butpushes back against the depiction of the early Middle Ages as ignorant and superstitious, arguing that there is a consistency and rationality to healing practices at that time., roughly 400 to 1000 C.E.

This ninth-century manuscript juxtaposes a physician with Christ’s cross. Bibliothèque nationale de France, CC BY-SA There was no way to perceive the internal state of the body via technology – instead, healers had to be excellent. They sought to match the patient’s description of suffering with signs that manifested externally on the body. The inside of the flesh could not be seen, but the fluids the body excreted – sweat, urine, menstrual blood, mucus, vomit and feces – carried messages about that invisible realm to the outside.

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