Enlightenment Era Hospitals and Medicine

Enlightenment Era Hospital
(http://history.msu.edu/hst425/schedule/medicine-in-the-enlightenment/)

Due to scientific research during the enlightenment, vast improvements were able to be made in the realms of health, hygiene, and medicine. Thanks to the increased number of physicians and public interest in health, hospitals first started to appear in the 1700’s during the enlightenment especially in Britain and France. They were originally private organizations run by charitable aristocrats and many of the doctors focused on decreasing the mortality rates of things like childbirth and common ailments such as smallpox. By the 1800’s governments started to run hospitals when they realized that helping their sick citizens both made them appreciate the state more and was cheaper than letting them die.

Enlightenment Era Medical Diagram
(http://history.msu.edu/hst425/schedule/medicine-in-the-enlightenment/)

Hospitals would not have arisen and medicine would not have improved had it not been for the the public’s changing attitude towards science during the enlightenment. Although there was still much superstition in relation to ailments, doctor’s views on sickness varied from being caused by an imbalance of humors to theories about infections that were closer to modern ones. In general the populace was starting to pay more attention to science when it came to how to stay healthy. The upper-class especially was beginning to pay more and more attention to ways to prevent illnesses like hygiene and vaccines. Scientist’s growing understanding of the human body allowed new theories about how humans work to arise.  Instead of believing that the body was the vessel for the soul, some scientists were starting to theorize that the body was something more like an organic machine.

Painting of a Vaccination
(http://history.msu.edu/hst425/schedule/medicine-in-the-enlightenment/)

Today, if somebody were to tell you that human movement derived from a divine infusion of power, you would dismiss the idea as ludicrous. We use our muscles to move and everyone knows that. However, people believed that people’s souls controlled their body up until the European Enlightenment. It was at this time that, building on the work of thinkers like Descartes, Enlightenment thinkers put forward the modern idea of secular medicine. The idea that the human body can be understood, and is at its core simple a machine, albeit a very complicated one. It was using this mindset that Enlightenment doctors were able to make huge advances. One example of this is the practice of inoculation. What began in the 18th century as injections of human smallpox puss developed into the Edward Jenner’s cowpox-based smallpox vaccine by the end of that same century.