Europe’s medicine of these dark ages was somewhere between spiritual guidance and pagan believes. If you were to see a doctor because you’re sick, you could expect that the doctor will say something like – “it’s destiny”. Or, on the other hand, you may be paying your debts because of your sins and the Gods decided to punish you with your illness.
Christians of that time believed in a magical solution. Charms and incantations combined with herbs were replacing medical laboratories and their equipment. If all the herbs and magic can’t help you, the only way to get well is via prayer, because God was the one who decided who’ll get sick and who’ll be healthy, depending on their behavior.
The Canon of Medicine was a medical encyclopedia translated from Arabic, in the thirteenth century. This book gathered knowledge from both Islamic and Greek medicine.
-Herbal Survivor
-Hippocratic Corpus
-Galen
These three are the books that influenced the medicine of that time, of course, only to the ones that had access to them.
The cultural and religious believes are huge factors on the medical heritage of any people. Peoples of that time used to blame an elf or some other “magical” creature for their illness. Some of them were more direct, and blamed the devil himself. Demons and evil spirits were also often blamed for a headache or a cough.
In the next period of medical development, medical practitioners concentrated on fluids. They divided fluids into four basic groups:
-Black bile
-Yellow bile
-Phlegm
-Blood
Depending on the type of fluids you have troubles with, you’d get a treatment. That treatment considered a certain diet or consuming a mixture of herbs. Herbal therapy also came from their faith in God – they believed that he has sent all the illness onto the bad ones, but that he had also sent some hidden way for them to get better. Except for the herbs, people of that time believed that he also sent remedies in minerals, vegetables, animal meat. Those cures, they believed, would look different in the eyes of sick ones. Holy water had its rise a period later and then became the main piece equipment for medical practitioners of that time. It works on vampires, too.
Modern medicine
A lab is a space that has controlled conditions – that excludes any unwanted factors, where it is possible to experiment and perform researches.
There are different types of laboratories which are equipped with objects that are necessary to a person who wants to perform a certain task. Depending on the research and the person operating, there is a special kind of currently existing equipment that is used to improve and help with a wanted action.
A medical laboratory needs to be carefully observed and controlled, because the importance of researches done there is equal to the importance of a human life. There are a lot of differently shaped dishes and instruments that serve a doctor:
-Microscope
-Tubes of all shapes and sizes
-Flasks
-Micropipettes
-Electrolyte analyzer
-Colorimeter
-Glass slide
-Needles and syringes
-Chemistry analyzer
-Gloves
-Centrifuges of different speeds
-Chromatography (glass, paper, liquid, ion, countercurrent, thin-layered)
-Beaker
-Petri dish
-DNA analyzers
-Microplate readers
-Ovens
-Refrigerators and freezers
-Blood-gas analyzer
Well trained professionals use this equipment to make blood tests and analyze them as soon as possible, so they could help anyone who’s sick. The right kind of diagnoses serves as an obligation of sorts, so the patient has to do the doctor ordered. Remedies are a careful mixture that has been perfected for centuries and made in exact, perfect proportions.
The whole hospital system still isn’t perfect. There are queues, and the staff is not always professional, so… mistakes happen. But, we have seen major progress. At least no one with a college diploma will prescribe to wash one’s self in a barrel of holy water when the moon is full, right? Medical equipment is still advancing and robot-surgeons are under development. Soon, we’ll have an unmistakable form of medicine and laser surgeries, with the help of robots will be more precise and it will be able to go where the human hand couldn’t and thus save a lot more human lives.
Ivan Dimitrijevic is a blogger with interest in life improvement and health topics. He has many articles published on health and medicine, and strives to learn more on the subject each day.