Medical in the Middle Ages Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Medical in the Middle Ages - Essay Example It was in Salerno, for example, that much work was done by academics and others, supported and sponsored by the Church, to articulate for a new age the traits of Hippocratic medicine as a tradition. It is the results of this and other contemporaneous work which exerted great influence on physicians, healers and other medical practitioners until as late as the 19th century (Porter 1998, p. 13).2 Opportunities for a medical education were scarce at the beginning of the High Middle Ages. So-called cathedral universities that offered medical education, such as that of Chartres in France, were an exception. One reason for this seems to be that, because universities during this period generally offered a broad education in the humanities that did not have as a specific objective a curriculum designed to produce professional physicians, the education one could expect differed substantially in nature and content from that which was developed in Salerno from the 11th century onwards (Nutton 1995, p.139). The earliest Salernitan texts used for teaching purposes were the product of many variables, such as the influence of Arab medical knowledge imported into southern Italy by Arab settlers who maintained contact with Byzantium and northern Africa, which combined to infuse a new and more speculative view into medieval medical thought (Nutton 1995, pp.140). Medical education and professional training in the Late Middle Ages was greatly influenced and accelerated by a narrowed focus on medical learning as a discipline, which was adopted by university educators from about 1250 onwards (Nutton 1995, pp. 142-159). One work in particular, Articella, revived interest in and pursuit of the Galenic medical tradition, which built on the earlier Hippocratic works, and for the first time gave university medical educators and practitioners a 'sacred text' by which a physician's professionalism and knowledge could be measured and benchmarked based on his expert comprehension, understanding and application of the series of books that comprised the contents of the Articella compendium (Nutton 1995, p. 142). By holding to an assumption that all disease stems from natural as opposed to supernatural causes, physicians and healers throughout the medieval period, following the Hippocratics who established the tradition long before them during the Hellenic period, appealed to human nature itself for specific natural causes. It is for this reason that the treatise in the Corpus that elaborates the main tenets of Hippocratic medicine most ardently and succinctly is On the Nature of Man (Jones 1923, Volume IV). Medieval medical practitioners, in adopting and using these ideas, sustained the essence of Hippocratic thought by seeking to explain the nature of the human body by direct observation of it followed by systematic analysis of this observation. Medieval physicians and other medical practitioners used the precepts presented in the Hippocratic treatise, On the Nature of Man, to treat their patients (Nutton 1995, pp. 175-183). It is in this text that the theory of the four humors is discussed in detail, relating that the human body is comprised of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile

Can the direct targeting of civilians ever be morally justified Essay

Can the direct targeting of civilians ever be morally justified - Essay Example The Second World War caused numerous consequences to different nations owing to its magnitude and scale involving a vast geographic proportion of the world economies. It has been noted in this regard that the Second World War had been commenced with the participation of the then topmost nations of the world, which apparently signified the polarized world of the 20th century, where one side was apparently stronger and powerful than the other side. Comparing the casualties caused due to the First and the Second World War, especially those suffered by the civil societies around the world excluding the military property losses, historians revealed that area bombing campaign in the latter had a more devastating result. To be noted, the concept of area bombing was first developed by the British military during the war, where they had planned to attack certain specific areas of Germany as a part of their war strategy. The decision of Britain to attack German civil areas through the bombing strategy was mainly with the intention to deindustrialize the conditions of Germany and to make the nation weak from within. To be precise, with the civilians being affected due to the warfare, it was quite likely to increase threats for domestic social as well as political unrests. Also, with the destruction of such a huge proportion of civilians, Germany would eventually become weak to afford the continuously rising need for soldiers to fight its enemies. This further meant that Germany will not be able to attack or pose a threat to any other nation during the Second World War. Therefore, it can be apparently observed that the intention behind area bombings by British on German civilians was to make the country vulnerable both economically as well as socially, with the expectation that it would eventually drive the nation away from participating in the wars. Apparently, this area bombing approach taken by the British military against Germany,