Anthropology

Last edited Wed Mar 30, 2022, 11:14 PM - Edit history (1)

on religious grounds in cases like Galileo. It also opposed the use of cadavers for medical students to study during some periods, but by the time that Lister, Semmelweiss, and, before them, Nostradamus, and other well know physicians, were studying medicine, autopsies to learn about diseases and anatomy were being done.

In the case of blood letting and the 4 tumors, though, physicians in Europe and in Islamic countries were committed to the humoral theory of disease causes based on studies of Greek and Roman pre-Christian physicians and philosophers, not the church. Philosophies of humoralism existed in ancient India, Egypt, and Persia before the Greeks and Romans picked up on the ideas and systemstized them into their own medical theories and treatments. That happened about 5 1/2 centuries before the beginning of Christianity.

Europe stuck with that theory for centuries because they had represented the height of civilization and learning as Rome carried civilization into the rest of Europe through conquests. Islamic physicians and philosophers picked up and adopted the medical theories from ancient Rome and Greece as they conquered southern European lands.

So adherence to humoral theory was secular more than religious in origin and continuity.

Agree that the Black Death shook the foundation of peoples' religious beliefs, and of the church's authority, as evidenced in how the flagellants expressed their independance. But I would not credit them with bringing reason and science to medicine. Just the opposite.

Religion has obstructed scientific learning at times and continues to do so today in some, though not all, religious circles. But I don't think the adherence to blood letting and humoral theories of disease fall into that category.