Which Had a Greater Impact on the Fight Against Disease in the Middle Ages?

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In the middle ages, religion played a big part in impacting the fight against disease. Many people believed that God caused many illnesses, for instance, ‘The Black Death’. They believed that God plagued them with these diseases as a way of punishing them for their wrong doings. They also believed that through prayer, God would forgive them and restore their health. Although this helped increase people’s faith, it meant that doctors did not attempt to find out what was causing these plagues scientifically; resulting in no improvements made in medicine. The Christian church encouraged people to believe in Galen and the four humours, which meant that doctors were again discouraged to look for the real causes of disease and were forced to follow Galen’s wrong ideas. As a result, doctors were delayed and medical knowledge failed to progress However, the Christian church introduced hospitals which the sick, poor and old could stay in and were looked after by the nuns and priests, this had a great impact because it meant that people with certain problems had a safe place to go to and would get help, this helped medicine progress a lot. However, hospitals might have hindered the development of medicine a little because they did not allow people with contagious diseases to stay in these hospitals in fear that other people would catch them. This meant that these ill people had no choice but to go back home, which would have resulted in them spreading their diseases to people on the streets because they didn’t have proper medical care and weren’t under supervision and were not isolated from everyone else. However in the Islamic empire, they had hospitals that had separate wards for different diseases, this meant that people had specialist care because the different wards had different doctors which focused on different illnesses. They encouraged people to look after the sick
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