1. The Church encouraged people to pray in order to avoid or get better from illness. People could also buy an indulgence where the Church would lessen the punishment for their sins. People could also go on a pilgrimage (religious journey) or pray on relics.
The Church told Christians that it was their duty to look after the poor and sick, so the Church played a large part in developing hospitals. Over 160 were set up in 1100s and 1200s. Some of these were very small, some were attached to monasteries, some refused to help women or the very sick but at least they offered some form of help. These were centres of rest where sick people might recover in quiet and clean surroundings.
The Church set up university schools of medicine throughout Europe where physicians could be trained using the texts of Galen. These texts were hand-written by monks and had been translated from Arabic when they were brought back from the east during the Crusades
The Church did not allow dissection and taught that the human body must by buried immediately. Towards the end of the Medieval era and into the Renaissance(c.1450) the Church started to allow supervised dissection where a lecturer would read out Galen’s work and a demonstrator would perform the dissection. This was only done to prove Galen right and satisfy curiosity enough so that people would not perform dissection themselves. Until this time, nobody had dared to challenge the Church and the Church had not needed to prove itself.
Any scientists or people who challenged the Church and tried to insist on the sue of science and observation in medicine ran into difficulty. Roger Bacon, A Franciscan monk and lecturer at Oxford University, was arrested around 1277 for spreading anti-Church views after questioning the Church’s stance on Galen.
The Christian Church believed in the example of Jesus, who healed the sick. However there was a strong belief that illnesses came from God who had send it as a punishment or a test of faith and so it was important to care for the patient but not necessarily to cure them.
Prayers to God were the most important treatment. The Church also encouraged the belief in miraculous healing. There were many shrines filled with relics of the bones, hair and other body parts of a holy person. These shrines were places that made pilgrimage to for help with their illness.
While the Church valued prayers, it also respected the traditional medical knowledge of the Ancient World because it thought that Hippocratic and Galenic ideas were correct. Monks preserved and studied these ideas – they copied out the books by hand, as well as traditional medical books like “Pliny’s Natural History”, which was an encyclopaedia of everyday family remedies.
Hospitals depended on charity for money and were mainly financed by the Christian Church or by a wealthy supporter. There were lots of different types of hospitals for example; the mentally ill such as Bedlam in London. Monasteries had infirmaries that could provide free treatment to the sick and poor. The hospitals did not contain doctors.
There were special hospitals called “Lazar houses” that dealt with people who had leprosy. The disease was contagious and so to prevent people catching it, leprosy hospitals were set up outside towns. These were often started by Crusaders who had caught the disease in the Middle East during the Crusades
Churches contained quite sophisticated herbal remedies. Patients of a church hospital would be bathed upon entering and then their clothes would be taken away for a thorough wash. The patient would then be put to bed. The main treatment was prayer – this was normally delivered by old nuns or monks.
The Christian Church controlled the universities because that was where religion was studied and where Church leaders were trained; medicine was usually the second subject studied after religion.

2. In Britain, the Church controlled the training of doctors in the universities of Oxford AND Cambridge. They were taught the medical ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The training was to make the old idea clear and not to learn new ideas.
The Christian Church approved of Galen’s books because they mentioned a creator which fitted in with their beliefs. This made it difficult to challenge anything that Galen wrote because it would be seen as a criticism of the Church.
The Church saw the role of the doctor not as a healer but as someone who could predict the symptoms and duration of an illness and provide the reasons why God might inflict the illness on the person. This gave people comfort and allowed patients and their families to put their affairs in order and die in peace. As Faritius, the famous 11th Century doctor, said to the family of a little boy who died – “there is no medicine for death.”
Western Europe entered a period known as the Dark Ages when the Roman Empire fell and lost its power. At this time, Islam became the main religion in the Middle East and North Africa. The followers of Islam became united in peace and Islamic doctors made great contributions to medical knowledge.
The Islamic eastern world was peaceful and ordered and this was the environment needed for medical progress. The Islamic Empire was ruled by one leader called a Caliph. During the reign of Caliph Harun-al Rashid ( ), the capital of Baghdad become a centre for the translation of Greek medical texts into Arabic (the language of Islam).
The Caliph’s library in Baghdad preserved hundreds of ancient Greek medical books by Hippocrates and Galen which were lost to Western Europe during the Dark Ages. Al-Rashid’s son, Caliph al-Mamum (813-33) developed his father’s library into “The House of Wisdom”, which was the world’s largest library at the time and study centre for scholars
The Islamic religion encouraged medical learning: Prophet Muhammad inspired people to “seek learning as far as China” and said, “For every disease, Allah has given a cure.” Therefore, scientists were encouraged to discover those cures. Islamic doctors were not allowed to perform dissections.
The first hospitals in the Islamic Empire were set up for people with mental illnesses. These people were treated with compassion as victims of an unfortunate illness (Christian doctors thought mental illness was a punishment from God).
In 805, Caliph al-Rashid set up a new hospital in Baghdad with a medical school and library. This was intended to treat the patients and not just care for them. Hospitals called bimaristans were built in many Islamic cities to provide medical care for men, women, rich, poor, Muslim and non-Muslim. Doctors were always present and medical students trained with them.
Two Muslim doctors called Rhazes and Avicenna had a great influence on medicine in Western Europe. Their ideas arrived there in the Middle Ages. Their work was translated into Latin (the language of the West) by a merchant called Constantine the African who arrived in Italy in c An Italian translator called Gerard of Cremona translated Avicenna’s “Canon of Medicine”. Medical ideas spread to England via trade.
Rhazes(c ) stressed the need for careful observation of the patient and distinguished between measles and smallpox for the first time.
He wrote over 150 books. Although he followed Galen, he thought all students should improve on the work of their teacher. One of his books was called “Doubts about Galen”.
Avicenna (c ) wrote a great encyclopaedia of medicine known as “Canon of Medicine”. Containing over a million words, it covered the whole of ancient Greek and Islamic medical knowledge at the time. It listed the medical properties of 760 different drugs and contained chapters on medical problems such as anorexia and obesity. It became the standard European medical textbook used to teach doctors in the West until the 1600s.