By which I mean, if someone was ill or injured in the 11th century I reckon I, a lay person in medicine although trained in first-aid and with modern understanding and education in germ theory, diet and hygiene might be a better bet than the local quack who believed in bleeding to keep the bodily humours in balance, ‘bad air’ miasma and divine wrath theories of diseases.
Today however a sick person would be much better advised to go to a qualified physician than me.
So, what I’m thinking is that between those points there must have been a point in history where the medical profession ‘overtook’ my lay modern knowledge. What are the best guesses as to when this would be? I’m guessing the location would be a factor - would it be earlier in say, China than western Europe?
Likewise I’m guessing the particular ailment would be a big factor; my clean hands and modern knowledge of anatomy would be an advantage in survivability in basic surgery whereas someone with cancer is doomed whether they go to the medieval practiser of physik or me. Additionally the 11th century local physician might know herbal treatments lost on me. What do you think?
11th century medical treatment was quite advanced. And please do not be too quick to dismiss the “quack treatments”, many of them worked better than you might expect.
Certainly, in the 11th century, you are far far worse than a physician for most ailments. I would say for most of civilised history, you would be worse, and hunter gatherers would out of necessity have more hands on experience of first aid than we would today,.
Ultimately it depends on the disease and the region. A mild ailment can be taken care off easily, even today using folk remedies, my doctor gf uses them for instance. OTH, many of the dieases which would have been fatal in the past and are shurrged off now, well they need things like antibiotics etc which you will not have,
Another issue is the type of injury. Do you (however much anatomical knowledge you have) know how to set a bone? What about how to fix a dislocated shoulder? Barber-surgeons (or people with that function) would have known that quite a few centuries ago.
I think it would depend on the ailment and also if you had any access to modern, well, anything. Say you were out backpacking in the wilderness and one of the group was a surgeon. Somebody suffers a bad fall resulting in a compound fracture, or serious internal bleeding. The group has brought along a typical first aid kit – a tube of neosporin, a bottle of ibuprofen, a tweezers, an assortment of small bandages and a little roll of tape, maybe a bottle of salt tablets, an ace bandage, a needle and thread . . . think operating without anaesthetic or a sterile field or sterile instruments (or any instruments other than a pocket knife), no matter how cleverly he kludges things together from what the group might be carrying, is going to have a good outcome? Pretty damn dicey, I would think. And if the patient could not be airlifted to a modern hospital pronto, the outcome looks a lot worse.
Mostly what a modern non-trained person could do that, say, a medieval doctor, could not, is avoid doing what we now know is either useless or detrimental, and wash things better. My uneducated opinion here.
I’m thinking of things like medical astrology (the Black Death was blamed, among other things like Jews casting spells, on alignment of planets), use of saint’s relics and pilgrimages to express penance. Granted there may have been a placebo effect to these ‘treatments’.
I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but when my family lived in Cyprus a family friend broke a leg and rather than getting it set by the doctor, they got it set by one of the shepherds in the mountains. This was not an issue of cost, it was that the shepherd had far more experience at setting broken bones.
This is of course a WAG, I would guess that for most ailments which you would be able to treat with your rudimentary knowledge of 21st medicine , you would find that the barber-surgeon was more experienced and better able to treat. Your knowledge of germ theory and the importance of sterilization though I imagine could offer you an edge though in terms of stopping infections.
I’m not disagreeing or arguing. But if you could give some examples (beyond the bone-setting that I thank others for mentioning) it would be very enlightening.
For much of recorded history there was no concept of the circulation of the blood, or of the correct function of the various organs. Ideas about anatomy derived from Galen, who was not allowed to anatomise humans and had to rely on apes and monkeys - close, but in some areas led him seriously astray.
Many surgical techniques have been known for millenia. Cataract surgery for over2800 years. Brain surgery since neolithic times. Egyptian medical texts can date back thousands of years.
Herbal remedies (many of which survive as “traditional medicine” today) have been around for thousands of years. Even today, researchers are often cued in on what works by identifying herbs and plants which were used and obtaining the active ingredient.
Ultimatley, I suspect the 11th century peasent would be better than an 21st century individual at handling certain diseases and injuries. We can run to a doctor today, they often did not have that choice, so they would be better trained in setting bones, suturing wounds etc than an average modern individual since those are skills we do not need today.
Suturing wounds doesn’t require any particular skill, though, just a lack of squeamishness. I’d trust somebody who’d never done it before but who knew to sterilize the needle over someone with plenty of experience who didn’t sterilize.
The problem with your barber surgeon is that he would not wash his hands, clothes, or anything else between cutting off a gangrenous leg and stitching up your cut arm.
Germ theory of disease was not known. The correlation between filth and disease was so known but nof well understood. Some surgeons would wash their hands regularly between surgeries and indeed midwives had better survival rates than ddoctos because they always did.
Re cataracts and some varieties of brain surgery (the show Rome had an excellent example of this) ancient Roman and Arabic surgeons were far more skilled in this than modern layman. Check out these instruments from Pompeii
Cell pathology didn’t eclipse Four Bodily Humours as the dominant theory of medicine until around the time of the Civil War. It’s said that President Garfield was hurt less by his assassin’s bullet than by the doctors who tried to remove it. Palliative medicine was practiced in the Muslim world, so you might have been better off in Constantinople than London for most of the last millennium.
I thought midwives had better stats than doctors because they weren’t also poking around sick people (or dissecting dead bodies) in between labours. Much less cross-infection risk.
Certainly the pre-germ-theory death rates for having babies in hospitals was appalling - about 1 in 6 in the early 19th century, from memory.
I think during most of the middle ages you’d be better off going to a (not at all prestigious) barber-surgeon or the old lady down the road than to an actual qualified doctor. Qualified doctors did a lot of questionable things. Eg, bleeding, purging, cupping. They were often fond of large doses of poisons like arsenic or mercury. they did know that if you got the dose wrong it might kill you but a lot of diseases could kill you anyway, so…
I don’t think you can discount the importance of basic hygiene in a pre-antibiotic world. Semmelweiss’s introduction of handwashing into maternity hospitals reduced death rates by about 4 times or more - this was in an environment where there was a lot of disease about anyway, but even in an ordinary home environment I’m sure you’d still see a fairly striking effect. And there are water-borne diseases like cholera and typhoid that you can guard against by ensuring your water supply too.
I would say no earlier than about the start of the 19th century.