One of the things that would be required is a doctor who’s used to being able to operate in less than ideal conditions: a military doctor, or one who’s been in Medicus Mundi or similar organizations. Or a Cuban doctor, they have a reputation for achieving things that are barely short of miracles with very little means.
I don’t know about doctors from other countries, but IME 99% of Spanish doctors have no real knowledge of the chemistry, biochemistry and physics behind their work. They can pass the exams on those subjects all right, but they think that a keto group is “a narrow band in the infrared.”
That the plague epidemics were spread by rats is no longer widely held to be true. Studies have shown, for example, that vermin move too slowly to account for the extremely rapid spread of the disease (which may not even have been the same sort of bacterial infection recognized today as plague).
A simple battery or a highly inefficient generator, maybe, but what would you do with it? You’d have a hard time getting high enough voltages for a defibrillator, and anything else would be even more difficult.
I meant it more as an example of how a simple intervention in prenatal care can have significant benefits. I’m creating good drinking water as part of my community medicine spearhead.
I don’t think making electricity is going to pay off in the near term. Worst of all, I have to invent electricity, radioactivity and computers in order to make a CAT scanner.
Why do you say that? I’d guess that most reasonably intelligent people with a general science background and a little bit of basic knowledge could manage to come up with antibiotics.
They have the huge advantage that they know they exist. Even casting about somewhat blindly, they’ll get there if they’re determined and logical.
Off the top of my head, all I am sure I know is:
Penicillin comes from mold.
It was observable to the naked eye in a bacterial culture.
Now, I don’t know how to culture bacteria, but I bet it involves some sort of nutrient-rich stuff and an incubator. Not sure what sort of nutrients or what temperature, but I know how to work a lab book. I don’t know what kind of mold makes penicillin, but I can certainly gather types of mold and throw them into petri dishes, once I’ve gotten the knack of culturing bacteria. etc.
I could probably reinvent all sorts of stuff I don’t really know how to make just because I have so much smaller a target to shoot at.
Well, you could push for clean government - which is a prerequisite for clean streets and clean drinking water. Building crappy sanitation is cheaper than building good sanitation. Dumping used tanning chemicals in the Thames is a hell of a lot cheaper than storing it safely. If merchants can save a buck by going that route, even if they need to bribe some officials, they will. The way to counter corruption, both private and public, is through a free and critical press.
Good luck with that one. You didn’t really need your head, did you?
Those unhealing scars were VD … he was also probably fairly diabetic, and his diet sucked [our list docs will tell you that good nutrition is essential yo helping heal faster, diabetics heal for shit when their glucose is uncontrolled, and that VD really does need antibiotics to cure, otherwise they jsut go into a state of dormancy until it goes active again.]
Willow Bark was known and used. The problem is, that Willow Bark tears up your stomach like nobodies business. This always gets a laugh out of me when I read in some book about some modern day “Medicine Woman” translated to the past that (or past times but enlightened Medicine Woman) comes up with Willow Bark as a miracle drug.
We really don’t know what was the cause of Henry VIII’s ulcer - VD? Diabetes? Scurvy?
Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor: if you boil pine needles, it pretty much gets rid of the Vitamin C. But you’re on the right track.
You could create topical antibiotics. Honey or alcohol can be used topically. As far as internal antibiotics, large doses of garlic might work for that.
I think by the 16th century there was definitely enough of a meritocracy in places like England that someone who was successful at his trade could become quite rich and powerful even if he was not part of the nobility. They had to come up with “sumptuary laws” which limited the amount of gold, jewelry and other decorations that someone could wear based on their ranking in the peerage, because there were so many non-nobles who were becoming rich through trade, and even then, the richest merchants could pay a tax to make them exempt from these laws. The Renaissance was a time when someone who was good at what he did could go very far, especially if he attracted the attention of the right people. Probably a good way to start for our hypothetical doctor would be to first become the doctor of a successful merchant, and then he would eventually be noticed by nobles, and then ultimately by the monarch.
Honey and alcohol were used topically in Tudor England as wound treatment. Honey was used either by itself or as part of the “Egyptian Unguent”, which was a mixture of honey, vinegar, and wintergreen, boiled together. If you’re curious, here’s Ambroise Paré’s treatment for a skin ulcer. (Paré was the French royal physician from 1552-1590.)
The fact that some of those engaged in trade became rich tells us nothing about how men entered particular trades. Contrary to what you seem to assume, the regulations restricting who could work in which trades were extremely strict in Tudor England. No one could just set themselves up as a merchant. Or rather, unless they were a freeman of a corporate town and often of the right guild as well, their opportunities to trade would be extremely limited. You would literally have been unable to take your goods to market.
Moreover, in the case of the medical trades, restrictions in the early sixteenth century were becoming even tighter. This is what would really wreck the time traveller’s chances.
There was not much point in knowing about better hygiene unless you were a barber-surgeon. But if you were a barber-surgeon, you wouldn’t be prescribing medicines, let alone supplying them. All three medical professions - physicians, barber-surgeons and apothecaries - aggressively defended their own patch against encroachment by the other two. Anyone trying to encroach on all three would be just asking for trouble. You would, at the very least, be forced to specialise. Not that, even then, you would get very far.
In the case of physicians, it was from 1523 illegal to practise anywhere in England without a degree from Oxbridge (how’s your Latin?) or a licence from the College of Physicians. This was a rule the College of Physicians was always very keen to enforce. Good luck trying to get round that.
Barber-surgeons and apothecaries didn’t have it very much easier. Although there were no national restrictions, there were plenty of local ones. Barber-surgeons who were not members of the right guilds and apothecaries who were not members of the Grocers’ Company were unable to work in London. Also, others elsewhere would not have been able to work in most towns unless they were a freeman. So if you were (in sixteenth century terms) unqualified, you would be restricted to working in the countryside. Not exactly the way to maximise your impact. And you would have those pesky physicians on your back if you tried anything beyond what surgeons or apothecaries were traditionally expected to do.
As for being allowed to treat the king, forget it. Sixteenth-century royal doctors acted in groups. Consensus was everything. The last thing anyone wanted was for one of the royal physicians to risk trying out anything new. Not to say something of a risk to that physician’s own life if the treatment then failed.
Working in the countryside would not necessarily be such a huge obstacle to success. The countryside did have nobles in it who presided over the villages, who could have been learned administrators with close ties to prominent figures. For instance, even Herefordshire, which was considered a real primitive backwater, was governed by Sir James Scudamore who was close friends not only with Queen Elizabeth herself but also with scientists like John Dee and Thomas Allen. If you were to practice medicine in a small village, and were able to save many lives in a seemingly-miraculous fashion, the earl or sheriff in charge of the village would eventually notice, and if you could get close to him, your chances of being elevated to a higher position increase greatly.
Alternatively many royal courtiers were also military commanders. Accompanying one of them on a military campaign would allow you many opportunities to demonstrate your medical skills; I’d imagine that an army at war was likely to be far less picky about who treated wounded soldiers than wealthy people living in cities.
Re antibiotics from mouldy bread - it was actually an enormous technical challenge to get penecillin into a form that could be used on actual patients (as opposed to just a test tube) with the technology available in the 1940s (let alone the Tudor era). I just got done reading a book on the development of penecillin (The Mould in Doctor Florey’s Overcoat - really fascinating book) - it was about 3 years, with a number of people working on the problem. Penecillin had actually been discovered about 2 decades before, but Fleming, the discoverer, couldn’t get anywhere with it and abandoned the project because he simply didn’t have the technical skills to refine and develop it. I’m very sure a random 21st century medic couldn’t do better.
