8-5Medicine

//Answer prepared by Juliet d.l.H// Many people, including the doctors, believed that there were fluids that made up man. These were called humours, and there are four. They believed that of all these fluids were made in the liver. These four humours are blood, phlegm (saliva mixed with respiratory waste, yew!), yellow bile (a.k.a choler), and black bile (melancholy). Besides these there were nine qualities, four members, two operations, three spirits, four ages, three fevers, four inflammations, and many, many more. One doctor suggested that age and season had an effect on how much of each fluid you had. They also said that the way that you acted was dependent on what the balance of the fluids were. The four elements that determined your health, these were air, wind, water, and fire. What these had to do with your health, I am not sure. Another belief that is now considered ridiculous is that certain gemstones could trigger or change different emotions. Garnets would make you happy, Topaz would stop anger, and Emeralds would ease your mind (//VERY// helpful…). These beliefs had not changed since Aristotle or Hippocrates and the diagnostics also didn’t change.
 * [[image:http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/images/doctor.jpg width="70" height="135"]]What were common medical beliefs, practices, and medicines in Elizabethan England?**

If you had a disease the cause would be too much of one of the four fluids and the cure would be to take blood (it would be very painful) or to remove the liquid (also very the way that the planets moved. Most medicines for colds or pain were “old wise women’s” mixtures or you would receive one of the 1,960(appox.) drugs of the time. The mixture of herbs, spices, plants, animals/bugs and vegetables probably didn’t do anything if not made the problem worse.

If you wanted a cure for an earache then you had to put roasted onions __into__ your ear! If you had a mental illness or a mental problem, a doctor would pump lamb blood into your blood stream and wouldn’t stop until you were dead and no one questioned these practices. The only requirement to become a doctor was to be a white male that was well educated. Most of the doctors during that time period went to a different country were they study abroad and then to Oxford or Cambridge collage after that.

Works Cited Silvette, Herbert. __The Doctor on the Stage__. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee P, 1967.

"Templateeliz." __Springfield Public Schools - Home__. 16 Apr. 2009 . "Templateeliz." __Springfield Public Schools - Home__. 16 Apr. 2009 .