Medieval medicine in Western Europe was composed of a mixture of existing ideas from antiquity. In the Early Middle Ages, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, standard medical knowledge was based chiefly upon surviving Greek and Roman texts, preserved in monasteries and elsewhere. Medieval medicine is widely misunderstood, thought of as a uniform attitude composed of placing hopes in the church and God to heal all sicknesses, while sickness itself exists as a product of destiny, sin, and astral influences as physical causes. On the other hand, medieval medicine, especially in the second half of the medieval period (c. 1100–1500 AD), became a formal body of theoretical knowledge and was institutionalized in the universities. Medieval medicine attributed illnesses, and disease, not to sinful behaviour, but to natural causes, and sin was connected to illness only in a more general sense of the view that disease manifested in humanity as a result of its fallen state from God. Medieval medicine also recognized that illnesses spread from person to person, that certain lifestyles may cause ill health, and some people have a greater predisposition towards bad health than others.
Influences
Hippocratic medicine
The Western medical tradition often traces its roots directly to the Ancient Greek civilization, much like the foundation of all of Western society. The Greeks certainly laid the foundation for Western medical practice but much more of Western medicine can be traced to the Near East, Germanic, and Celtic cultures. The Greek medical foundation comes from a collection of writings known today as the Hippocratic Corpus. Remnants of the Hippocratic Corpus survive in modern medicine in forms like the "Hippocratic Oath" as in to "Do No Harm".
The Hippocratic Corpus, popularly attributed to an Ancient Greek medical practitioner known as Hippocrates, lays out the basic approach to health care. Ancient Greek philosophers viewed the human body as a system that reflects the workings of nature and Hippocrates applied this belief to medicine. The body, as a reflection of natural forces, contained four elemental properties expressed to the Greeks as the four humors. The humors represented fire, air, earth, and water through the properties of hot, cold, dry, and moist, respectively. Health in the human body relied on keeping these humors in balance within each person.
Maintaining the balance of humors within a patient occurred in several ways. An initial examination took place as standard for a physician to properly evaluate the patient. The patient's home climate, their usual diet, and astrological charts were regarded during a consultation. The heavens influenced each person in different ways by influencing elements connected to certain humors, important information in reaching a diagnosis. After the examination, the physician could determine which humor was unbalanced in the patient and prescribe a new diet to restore that balance. Diet included not only food to eat or avoid but also an exercise regimen and medication.
Hippocratic medicine was written down within the Hippocratic Corpus, therefore medical practitioners were required to be literate. The written treatises within the Corpus are varied, incorporating medical doctrine from any source the Greeks came into contact with. At Alexandria in Ancient Egypt, the Greeks learned the art of surgery and dissection; the Egyptian skill in these arenas far surpassed those of Greeks and Romans due to social taboos regarding treatment of the dead. The early Hippocratic practitioner Herophilus engaged in dissection and added new knowledge to human anatomy in the realms of the human nervous system, the inner workings of the eye, differentiating arteries from veins, and using pulses as a diagnostic tool in treatment. Surgery and dissection yielded much knowledge of the human body that Hippocratic physicians employed alongside their methods of balancing humors in patients. The combination of knowledge in diet, surgery, and medication formed the foundation of medical learning upon which Galen would later build upon with his own works.