• the best scientific theories of the time
• world view, background knowledge, how people make sense of the world, assumptions made by educated people about how the world works
  
• common educated people
• common uneducated people who at the time had available folk and herbal traditions instead of formal medicine
  
• is the division more political today about science?

• empirical--based on experience and physical knowledge
• evidence-based medicine is being pushed, but isn't always followed
• today doctors start with diagnosis, then ideally there is a medication that will kill the germ causing the disease
• germ theory of disease was only accepted late 19th century
• the first medicine to kill the germ causing the disease was invented in 1910
  

• In modern terms bile is made by the liver and stored in the gallbladder, helps with digestion by breaking down fats
• in the early modern era both yellow and black bile were understood to have a role in digestion but yellow bile was also necessary to the lungs and black bile was also involved in the clotting of blood
• phlegm was something broader than the medical meaning of the word today--it included mucus, saliva, and lymph
• all of these were understood to circulate in the blood
• how to treat an illness depended on that particular person's unique balance of humors
• this focus on balance is a totally different way of thinking about health than today's focus on diagnosing a particular disease and then giving a medicine that treats that disease. The first treatment that worked the modern way was Salvarsan, invented in 1910.
  

• tradition that elite learning was philosophical
• abstract knowledge had more prestige than practical knowledge
• university medicine emphasized theory
• getting your hands dirty was low class, so surgery was done by barber-surgeons, not physicians
• dissection was unpopular but sometimes practiced
  
• many people still turned to traditional healers who used herbs and probably killed fewer people
  

chemical medicine (mostly minerals or refined forms) was coming into increased use--antimony and mercury to cause vomiting and/or diarrhea
The traditional authority in medicine was Galen (130-200 CE, Hellenistic period)

• medieval students learned anatomy when the professor read from Galen and a barber-surgeon dissected a corpse
• Galen said the blood moves through tiny holes between the right and left sides of the heart
• Vesalius (1514-1564) did careful dissection and showed that Galen was wrong about several things
• Vesalius published a book with detailed illustrations of the body
  
• Harvey proved the circulation of the blood in 1628
• blood gets from the arteries to the veins in capillaries--these are so small they were not actually seen until after Harvey's death
  
• blood moves in circles in the body just like the planets
  

• with a simple microscope you can see sperm.  The theory of preformationism said they have a miniature form of the future person inside, homonucleus (by this theory the mother contributed only the material)
• this was particularly embrace by those who saw the body as a machine
  
• the alternative theory was epigenesis: the person is formed in stages during development starting from shapeless semen and menstrual blood--this must be organized by something that might be called a soul or vital spirit
  

Joan Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644) was a vitalist, focusing on the spirit of life rather than on the body as simply a mechanical system

• rejected Aristotelian, Paracelcian and Galenic ideas
• picked up the ancient idea that the only element is water, combined with immaterial organizing ideas (semina)
• planted a tree in a fixed weight of soil and watered it.  The tree grew and the soil didn't diminish, so the water must be what became the tree (note the difficulty of trying to base knowledge on experiment)
  
• diseases come from seeds, something more like germs, not just imbalance, but the organizing principle of the body (archeus) if strong enough can fight them off
• he provided one basis for a new medicine (just as the new astronomy needed a new physics), but older ideas survived into the 19th century
• not much improvement in treatment
  

Botany and zoology (=flora and fauna)

• symbolic meanings were as important as physical facts (and in fact were not seen as different kinds of things)
• how to organize a collection of curiosities?
  
• books showing different kinds of plants or animals included symbolic meanings and mystical animals
• they didn't draw a line between "facts" and symbolism
• the discovery of many new plants and animals made the ancient authorities obsolete
  
• but there was a lot of controversy about new theories

people were throwing out the old theories
it was hard to come up with something useful to replace them
science is growing in the direction of isolating and simplifying and experiment and away from everything is connected, but gradually