The Next Renaissance

CHAPTER 8Resuscitating Healthcare

Renaissance Origins

Before the Renaissance, medicine was more ritual than science. Care was spiritual, not physical, and often indistinguishable from superstition. If you were fortunate enough to reach a monastic infirmary, your treatment might involve prayers, relics, or concoctions of garlic and holy water. If you weren't so fortunate, outside “healers” worked with gruesome remedies that bordered on harm: bloodletting with leeches, purges, and crude surgeries performed by barbers with razors and without anesthesia.

For centuries, the intellectual foundation of medicine rested on Galen, a Roman physician whose anatomical models were drawn from animals—pigs, monkeys, and other creatures whose physiology, at best, only roughly resembled ours. His texts dominated Europe for more than 1,300 years, insulated from revision by the authority of tradition.

The Renaissance changed everything. Slowly at first, and then decisively. Dissection of human bodies, once banned by the Church, became more accepted. Andreas Vesalius published the pivotal text in 1543: De Humani Corporis Fabrica, filled with precise anatomical illustrations from the study of human cadavers, not pigs. For the first time, the body was mapped with fidelity. The book spread across Europe, disseminating a new method of medical observation and experiment based solidly in evidence.

Hospitals changed too, becoming medical rather than religious institutions. Illness was studied, recorded, ...