Id think the most effective thing they could do is really do ‘first do no harm’.
Considering how terrifying most of the cures back then were, just not being given them would help in quite a few cases Id think.
Have leeches been mentioned? And inoculation? maggots too maybe?
Otara
It’s not a question of there not being people in the countryside who might have noticed. Every English county had at least a couple of dozen families such as the Scudamores. The commissions of the peace were stuffed with them. But your local JP (or his rival in the next village) would be just as likely to indict you for practising medicine illegally. There were more recorded prosecutions in England in this period for practising medicine without a licence than there were for witchcraft. That the cures worked wasn’t a defence.
Also, because there were always some of its senior members serving as royal physicians, a position which gave its holders regular private access to the monarch, the College of Physicians was especially well-placed to defend its vested interests. They already had the ear and the attention of the ultimate patron. That was influence they never hesitated to use.
Well, in real history, it took Sir Alexander Fleming 12 years of trying to get from the 1. step
a very special type of Mold = penicillium kills bacteria in a petri dish
to the 2. step:
Find a process to produce reliably and in large numbers that specific part of that specific mold - not any similar-looking mold - that actually does kill bacteria, without any of the other mold stuff that could be harmful to the patient.
Without success. Penicillin really became widespread and easily available after WWII = 1945; Fleming made his discoveryin 1928, and he worked in a good lab and with partners on it.
Leeches and bloodletting can be used to reduce high blood pressure in an emergency. Maggots will eat away dead flesh in cleaning a wound, especially in debriding a deep burn.
Simple sanitation has got to be one of the best things a modern could take back…add in nutrition, wound care, support of gastro patients [cholera, enteritis causing dehydration is especially deadly in children] an understanding of simple anatomy is invaluable …
I see now that Apsidastra already made that point, sorry.
I also agree with Nava that generally, a normal doctor of today is so used to using the huge network of cutting-edge medicine support, that he has little idea of how to do things with less, or nothing. So doctors without borders or battlefield surgeons might have better practice at improvising.
I would also, if I could, stop the idea of burning a wound to clean it. For some reason, it hung on a long time - even Hollywood westerns and current TV series show it, when in reality, a burn wound is a bigger infection site plus the shock and stress from the burn on top of the original wound. If you want to clean a wound, and the blood is not gushing, and you don’t have alcohol, you still cause less harm with a halfway clean piece of cloth or some water than with burning it out, no matter how much fire might have symbolical cleansing powers.
Don’t confuse Tudor era England with the later 18th and 19th century lying in hospitals - birth by midwife was significantly safer than the births by doctors, because a midwife wouldn’t be sticking her hands all up in dissected bodies before she sticks her hand up your bajingo when you’re in labor, and she probably only has one laboring woman at a time, not a whole ward of them. Not that puerperal fever wasn’t a problem, but the kind of labor ward that Ignac Semmelweis worked in didn’t exist in the time period at hand.
The old Greeks came up with the oath of Hippocrates, and most physicians through the ages followed it, because they adopted medicine from the greeks. Barber-surgeons were different, because they followed the craft route, instead of the college education. And a lot of the cures were also propagated by quacks not by real physicians.
But the lack of the scientific method, which meant clinging to outdated ideas like four humours because the revered ancient greeks couldn’t have been wrong about anything, meant that people kept to recipes because the ingredients like flesh from the mummy sounded magical and strong and therefore must help, or mixing in Asa foetida because anything that smells so strong must help.
Doctors also kept with their established drugs and methods because they worked part of the time at least. If you started experimenting without knowing what you were doing, that meant you were risking the lifes of your patients - for what? So better stick with what works instead of trying something that might work better, or might work much worse, when dealing with real people.
Enough people still look for wonder drugs today, because eating less and exercising more sounds so boring, it can’t work.
I hope people understood I was talking about modern applications of what I mentioned, ie that they could be helpful rather than being examples of horrible old practises.
And Im quite aware that first do no harm is ancient as a concept, its just that the practise didnt always match up with the concept. They didnt really know that things sometimes worked what they knew is sometimes the patient survived, and concluded from that that it worked sometimes.
Without any systematic tracking of survival rates, it was a complete crapshoot.
Otara
That’s what Martin Padway did in Lest Darkness Fall when he found himself transported back in time to sixth-century Rome.
In theory, you could. I’ve read books about how insulin was discovered, and it basically comes down to grinding up cow & pig pancreases and refining the results. They used dogs as test subjects, making them diabetic by removing their pancreases. It was amazingly primitive compared to modern day pharmaceutical research.
I think I’ve also read that a doctor in WWII had a diabetic wife, and was somewhere in Europe that was war-torn enough that they couldn’t get insulin, and he made it for her out of animal pancreases.
I’d guess that in Elizabethan times, the real trick would be figuring out a way to de-pancreas the dogs without killing them, and once you figured out the correct formula for insulin, coming up with a safe, clean manufacturing system for it. Even in the early 1920s, the manufacturing of insulin was a significant effort in itself, even after they figured out how to make it in small quantities.
Forget making antibiotics - too hard - the single easiest and most important secret to impart would be the cause (and preventative) of scurvy.
This one would have true strategic value in 16th century Europe, and be a lot easier to change than, say, sanitation habits (the big improvement there would come from the creation of sewage systems, a capital intensive venture beyond the means of 16th century monarchies).
Washing hands and sterilizing implements with alcohol would also be good of course, but nothing would be more immediately signicant than preventing scurvy.
And, for pulmonary edema / congestive heart failure.
I’m convinced that one of the reasons that leeches and bleeding were so popular is that they worked for pulmonary edema, and might have done so in a very impressive way. When you’ve got nothing much else to offer, it must be hard to resist using the one thing that actually can work (sometimes).
It’s not easy for doctors to debunk a popular medical treatment, even if it doesn’t actually work for anything. The placebo effect is strong. Look at homeopathy. It’s clear that it doesn’t work and couldn’t possibly work (a lot of the medicines don’t even contain one molecule of the active ingredient), and yet it’s still with us, more than 200 years after it was invented. I think a modern doctor transported back to Tudor times is going to have a much easier time introducing new remedies (like vitamin C for scurvy or smallpox vaccination) than getting rid of ineffective old remedies.
I wanted to note several things:
First, court physicians have frequently been complete quacks and charlatans, so a charismatic doctor who actually produced results would be quite possible. Or our intrepid physician could join the Church and rise that way.
Second, surgery was fairly rare in those days. It was actually not until the Civil War (in America) that significant advances in surgery occurred. The kind of firepower in use at the time led to wounds not even seen in Crimea. Doctors were forced to do so many they eventually figured it out pretty well, except for antiseptic conditions. The germ theory of disease was only then being developed in Europe, which was still the scientific center of the world.
Third, bleeding was not crazy. They didn’t understand it or exactly how to use it (and doctors could kill their patients), but they ahd a point. The well-off and even some common townsmen in Tudor times ate diets so rich we can hardly imagine them. Bleeding would help relieve heart strain temporarily by thinning the blood running in clogged arteries. It probably helped in the long run by forcing the body to regenerate the blood supply.
Eye glasses were invented (at least documented) in Italy in the early 1300’s, so yes, but unless the patient had astigmatism, it wouldn’t be a novel cure.
A caveat about surgery: it was a separate vocation from and much less respected than doctoring, which was almost entirely about prescribing medicine. At the time disease was considered almost entirely the result of what we would now call metabolic imbalances, correctable by the right prescription*. A mere sawbones who amputated gangreous limbs, extracted arrowheads and bullets, lanced the pus from lesions and set broken bones was socially maybe one step up from the corner butcher.
*The more things change, the more they stay the same