Renaissance medicineStudent: Sima VictoriaUNIVERSITATEA TITU MAIORESCUFACULTATEA DE MEDICINA DENTARASpecializarea Medicina DentaraCoordonator stiintific: As. Univ. Radu Mirela

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 (1514-1564), 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 the body.

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 RenaissanceDuring 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.

Bibliographyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Vesalius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Renaissancehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinciwww.descopera.rowww.medica.rowww.scientia.ro/.../4273-istoria-medicinei-medicina-in-sec-xvii.html

Thank you very much for your attention !