How did the church hinder medicine in the middle ages?
Of course it was a sin to examine a living body, folklore had previously said you could open up a ‘patient’ in order to stick medicine in them. They also thought that mental deficiency in children was due to a baby being swapped by fairies and should be killed-the church with idea of demons doesn’t seem that much better, but doesn’t seem to promote death for such a reason. Not that anyone was listening to the Church about that… Monks were skilled chemists (herbalologists) who knew something about medicine. And medieval people seemed less afraid of their bodies than Victorians for instance-God’s work and all that. Ok, Christian believed that the brain pumped the blood (unlike the Greeks etc. who said it was the heart) but William Harvey changed that.
