The Doctors and Medicine in the 1500's and 1600's

The doctors and medicine in the 1500's and 1600's was strange and pathetic. There wasn't really a sanitation system in Elizabethan England. Garbage was toss into the streets and left there for days. This then would attract rats and the rats would then spread the plague, which would then spread across the country side. They had many diseases, severe diseases like the scarlet fever, diphtheria, leprosy, scurbby, measles, chicken pox, and syphilis. Many with no cures because of the docters they had in the modern days. Children with the plague, chicken pox and diphtheria were abandoned bcause familys feared they would pass it on. These diseases were often brought back from explorers from long voyages or it was because they had a poorly balanced diet. They mostly ate bread and meat, drank a lot of wine and ate cheese but ate very few fruits and vegetables.

They had different

methods for curing medical problems. Physician cookes, apothecary or a herbalist, used homemade mixtures of many plants and animals that they thought would relive pain and fight diseases. They would mix "potions," trying to find eternal life, and cures to everything. They used different technique but the technique that was commonly used on people was to put leeches on a patients boody for high blood pressure. The leeches were to suck the blood out of the patients body. For caution this method had little effects and many dangerous drawbacks and side effects. They believed

that if you were to rub your eye with the tail of a black tomcat it was to cure a stye, another was to put a rosted onion in your ear, and to keep healthy was to drink lemon juice for its vitamin C. These methods were basically their medicine or what they believed

would cure things.

The sergeons were different in thoes times. The sergeons were the dentises and the barbers for most people. They were self-trained and unskilled compared to today's

physicians. Physicians were only for people who could afford