Very little medicine was much use during the Tudor period as doctors and physicians did not know very much about the human body. They were only just working out that the heart was a pump that sent blood around the body.
They relied a great deal on superstition and show. One of their main treatments, which was used from everything from a minor cold to the plague was the practice of blood letting or bleeding. This would be done with specially shaped sharp knives and bowls to collect the blood. Doctors also used cupping – applying a ceramic cup with a bulb to the skin that had been warmed up. As it cooled down, the air inside the bulb cooled and contracted and pulled the skin so hard that blood came to the surface.
Often people were bled too often and too much and the treatment probably hastened their decline and early death, rather than making them better.
They relied a great deal on superstition and show. One of their main treatments, which was used from everything from a minor cold to the plague was the practice of blood letting or bleeding. This would be done with specially shaped sharp knives and bowls to collect the blood. Doctors also used cupping – applying a ceramic cup with a bulb to the skin that had been warmed up. As it cooled down, the air inside the bulb cooled and contracted and pulled the skin so hard that blood came to the surface.
Often people were bled too often and too much and the treatment probably hastened their decline and early death, rather than making them better.