The Middle Ages was a grim time to be poorly. In the 1350s, the average life expectancy was perhaps 30-35. Infant mortality was extremely high where 1 in 5 children died before their first birthday and many women died in childbirth. Treatments continued to be a mixture of herbal remedies, bleeding and purging, and supernatural ideas.

Treatment

Most doctors believed the Greek theory from Galen, a doctor during the Roman Empire, that you became ill when the 'Four Humours' - phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, blood - became unbalanced.

They believed in many different explanations for ill health, some of which were associated with the supernatural. For example, the will of God, the stars, demons, sin, bad smells, charms and luck, witchcraft or astrology.

During epidemics, people would blame witches, nobility or groups who were culturally different such as Jewish people, and attack them. When a disease like the Black Death hit England in 1348, the doctors were powerless to stop it killing half the population. There were both supernatural and natural explanations for it, for example, some people said that God had sent it as a punishment, others that the planets were in the wrong conjunction, or that it was caused by 'foul air'.

Recently, historians have suggested that many medieval treatments were successful, especially the herbal remedies. Nevertheless, there were other types of cures used in the Middle Ages that many people would not consider today. For example:

bleeding, applying leeches, smelling strong posies or causing purging or vomiting

cutting open buboes, draining the pus and making the patient hot or cold, eg by taking hot baths

trepanning - cutting a hole in the skull

praying, or whipping themselves to try to earn God's forgiveness

lighting fires in rooms and spreading the smoke, tidying rubbish from the streets and banning new visitors to towns and villages

During this time, there were significant scientific discoveries such as William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood in 1628, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek's observation of bacteria in 1683. However, despite these discoveries:

doctors still did not know that germs caused disease – until the middle of the 19th century, they blamed a 'miasma' (a bad smell)

doctors were too expensive for most people

In the face of an infectious disease like the Great Plague of 1665, doctors were powerless.

Quinine

Many people resorted to using quack doctors (someone without real medical knowledge or qualifications) and crazy cures:

A lot of treatment was about making the room and the patient smell nice (doctors wore full body suits – with a 'beak' that was crammed with herbs – so that they wouldn't smell a bad smell).

Explorers found some new drugs in America (eg quinine), but doctors didn't know how or why they worked. Tobacco was said to cure everything from wind to snake bites.

They continued superstitions such as 'touching for the king's evil' (they thought the touch of a king would cure the skin disease scrofula).