Fighting Disease, 1500–1800

Between 1500 and 1800, the Renaissance had changed how educated people thought about the body, but everyday treatment of disease changed much more slowly. Most people were still treated with the same traditional methods as their medieval ancestors.

Traditional treatments that continued:

• Herbal remedies prepared at home or by an apothecary.
• Bleeding and purging, still based on the old idea of balancing the humours.
• Care from family, "wise women" and local healers.

What was new:

• Exploration brought new ingredients to Europe. The most important was cinchona bark (also called Peruvian or "Jesuit's" bark), which contains quinine and genuinely helped against fever and malaria. Other imports included tobacco, rhubarb and opium.
• Ideas spread more widely thanks to printing.

So this period is a mix of continuity and change: real progress in knowledge, but slow change in the medicines ordinary people actually received.

One striking feature of the 1600s and 1700s was the rise of quackery — the selling of useless or fraudulent treatments by untrained people.

• Quacks travelled from town to town or advertised in newspapers, promising to cure almost anything.
• They sold patent medicines: ready-made remedies with secret ingredients and bold claims.
• These medicines were usually worthless and sometimes harmful, often containing little more than alcohol, sugar or dangerous substances.

Quackery grew because there was no effective regulation, many people could not afford a physician, and there was still no understanding of what caused disease — so it was hard to prove a cure did not work.

Quackery is a useful example of continuity: despite the "beginnings of change", much popular medicine was still ineffective, and the factor of communication (newspapers and advertising) here helped spread bad ideas, not just good ones.

Plague returned to London in a serious outbreak in 1665, known as the Great Plague. Comparing it with the Black Death of 1348–49 shows how much — and how little — had changed.

Feature	Black Death (1348–49)	Great Plague (1665)
Known true cause?	No	No — still blamed on miasma and God
Believed causes	God, miasma, planets	God, miasma, "bad air"
Government response	Almost none	More organised (see below)
Some useless "cures"	Flagellants, bleeding	Charms, tobacco, plague doctors

The big change was government action. During the Great Plague, authorities:

• Ordered quarantine, shutting up infected houses and marking them with a red cross.
• Banned large public gatherings and closed theatres.
• Ordered the killing of cats and dogs (which, ironically, may have let the rat population grow).
• Appointed searchers to record deaths.

The cause was still unknown, so the response could not truly stop the plague, but the stronger role of government marks a real difference — a key example of the government factor beginning to grow.

The idea of a hospital also changed. Medieval hospitals, run by the Church, focused on care — rest, food, warmth and prayer — rather than curing illness. From around 1700, this began to shift.

• Many new voluntary hospitals were built, funded by wealthy charity rather than the Church.
• Their focus moved towards treating patients, not just caring for them.
• Hospitals became places of teaching and training for surgeons and physicians.
• Specialist hospitals appeared, including hospitals for the "insane" (such as Bethlem, known as "Bedlam") and, later, for children.

The hospital changed from a religious refuge into a place of treatment, learning and training — a clear sign of the "beginnings of change", and a shift from the factor of religion towards science and charity.

Alongside this, the training and status of surgeons and physicians slowly rose, setting the scene for individuals like John Hunter.

John Hunter (1728–1793) is the named individual for this part of the course. He did more than perhaps anyone in 18th-century Britain to raise the status of surgery and make it more scientific.

His contribution:

• He used a rigorous scientific, experimental method — observe, test, record — rather than relying on tradition.
• He carried out huge numbers of dissections and built a collection of around thousands of anatomical specimens for study and teaching.
• He wrote respected books based on careful observation.
• He trained a new generation of surgeons, most famously Edward Jenner, who went on to develop the smallpox vaccination.

Hunter helped turn surgery from a low-status trade (long linked with barbers) into a respected, evidence-based profession. He is a strong example of the individual and of science and technology as factors of progress.

(Extra context — not required by the 8145 spec, but useful: Hunter is sometimes linked to the grim trade in stolen corpses for dissection, which reminds us that anatomy teaching in this period was controversial as well as scientific.)

1. Overstating how much treatment improved

Knowledge and hospitals improved, but everyday treatment stayed limited because germ theory did not yet exist. Strong answers balance genuine change against important continuity.

2. Confusing the Great Plague (1665) with the Black Death (1348–49)

They are different outbreaks. The key contrast for the exam is that by 1665 the government acted far more (quarantine, shut-up houses, killing cats and dogs), even though the true cause was still unknown.

3. Treating quackery as a minor detail

Quackery is a spec point. It shows that popular medicine remained ineffective and that communication (advertising, newspapers) could spread bad ideas as easily as good ones.

4. Misremembering John Hunter

Hunter is important for making surgery scientific and respected and for training Jenner. He did not discover germs or invent vaccination himself.

5. Describing rather than analysing

For the significance question (worth 8 marks on Paper 2), do not just list what changed. Explain why it mattered — for example, why the shift from care to treatment in hospitals was significant for the future of medicine.