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The Black Death Plague Analysis

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“No tenant came from West Thickley because they are all dead”. This account, by the Bishop of Durham, is one of the many that portrays the horror spread by the Black Death. The plague, which arrived on European shores in 1348 and wiped out a third of the population, is caused by the transmittance of a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. Although this pandemic of bubonic plague incited much chaos within the medieval medical community and caused the quality of healthcare to decline, it served to promote the medical innovations that set in motion the development of medicine.
The Black Death forced doctors to change their perception of medicine by broadening their medical horizon and expanding their viewpoint. At first, due to the doctors’ false …show more content…
Before the plague, "602 instances of day care were recorded along with 263 in-patients”, whereas during three years of the Black Death, “sixteen day-patients were treated, compared with twenty-one in-patients. Day-patients also began to visit the infirmary for a much more extended period of time, to be specific, a median of 7.5 days per event compared to 4 previously. According to Sloane, this statistic suggests the “squeeze on day-patient care” as a result of the bar for admission being raised, the severe shortage of medical practitioners available to treat the day-patients, or the lack of available funding to properly treat them. Given the risk that came with this job, it is possible that doctors fled from their duties in fear of being infected, which many did. This caused a decline in the population of medical practitioners, consequently a decline in accessible healthcare. Furthermore, in a scenario where not only patients were fighting to survive, but also doctors, it is only natural for doctors to insert themselves in the equation, which inherently hindered their ability to provide the best care for the patients. In addition, it was unlawful for Jews to enroll in Christian universities, thus preventing them from receiving medical degrees. Therefore, people’s irrational fear of Jews may be one of the reasons for the shortage of manpower, as it limited …show more content…
The experience of the Black Death prompted the reevaluation of the Galenic system which gave way to the modern pathological theory. This new discovery laid the foundations to medical theories that help with modern procedures and research. On top of that, because of the Black Death, anatomical investigations were pursued with “more urgency and with higher levels of support from public authorities” than previously. Through these investigations, the medical world discovers new information with which doctors nowadays can do further research on and base off of in order to form new theories. The importance of surgeons, at this point, also became more evident. Additionally, one of the most notable results of the Black Death was the development of a crude theory of contagion. Until the emergence of germ theory in the nineteenth century, the medical world believed that diseases resulted from an imbalance of the four basic humors within the body (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile or choler). This concept is key to laying the foundations of modern biology by helping treat contagious diseases such as the common

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