How did medieval doctors become doctors?

Answer 1

Answer:

Only members of the Catholic priesthood were allowed to become doctors during the early middle ages. Others were charged with witchcraft if they tried to practice medicine.

Answer:

There were several different ways a person could become a health practitioner in the Middle Ages. A doctor of medicine was a person qualified to teach medicine. Surgeons were a different group, and were not doctors of medicine. There were other types of healers as well.

Surgeons got their knowledge by apprenticing in much the same way any other craftsman would, through years of working with a master. There were large numbers of these people. Groups of them accompanied every well organized army, so the injured soldiers could be treated. Surgeons also did such things as dental work, and were the people most often called on to extract teeth. Though there is a current understanding that medieval surgeons were what we call barber-surgeons, this is not correct. The two crafts were combined after the Middle Ages ended.

A physician who was doctor of medicine had a different background. In the Early Middle Ages, before there were universities in Western Europe, a doctor of medicine would have had to be trained at a medical school, of which there seem to have been a few. There were several at Salerno, which moved there from Velia for protection as the West Roman Empire was collapsing. They, and a monastic dispensary, combined in the 9th century to form the Salerno Medical School, one of the most famous medical schools if its time. An interesting fact is that at least some women were trained at this school, and one of the most famous doctors of the Middle Ages was Trotula of Salerno, a woman who taught medicine in Salerno and wrote books on the subjects of medicine and cosmetics. The Salerno Medical School continued to educate physicians ever since, and it became the University of Salerno in the 20th century.

Later, after universities were opened, people could choose to go to university to become a doctor of medicine, and this became the main type of education for physicians. This meant about ten years of university level medical training. The student started out with the general education in the basic liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. After that, he focused on medicine. While some of the universities were run by the Church, and were intended primarily to teach theology, others did not. Oxford and Cambridge, for example, were state financed, and many others were run on a commercial basis, by students and teachers. In many places, the curriculum was based almost entirely on secular considerations.

The university education in sciences was initially flawed because of an overly conservative approach to the subject, a problem that was recognized at the time. The problem was addressed during the 13th century by a series of Church actions called the Condemnations of 1210-1277. While this may sound like the Church interfering with science, its effect was quite the opposite. The condemnations banned the exclusive use of Aristotelian science by professors in the universities. Prior to the condemnations, if you wanted to know how many teeth a horse had, you looked it up in Aristotle's writings. If it was not there, then the information was not significant enough to consider. You did not look into the horse's mouth. After the condemnations, empirical science, based on observation, tended to prevail, and students were given a more scientific course of instruction.

Many people believed the best doctors in Europe were Islamic or Jewish, and both groups were particularly active in Spain. Islamic and Jewish medicine had different approaches from what was practiced by many Christians, including a basic understanding of the scientific method. These medical traditions became more important among Christians, beginning in the 13th century. In terms of the time and amount of training it took to become a physician, however, Islamic Medicine had the students taught in a way rather similar to how Christians were taught.

Aside from surgeons and physicians, there were two groups who were important in health care. One was midwives, who were women trained to assist in childbirth; they went through an apprenticeship system, though it was not as clearly defined, perhaps, as those of the crafts. Young women learned from older, more experienced midwives. Almost every village had a midwife in it or nearby.

There were also folk healers who followed various traditions, often involving herbal medicine. Most villages and someone of this type, pretty much ordinary people, except that they had learned something of how to tend people who were sick or injured. Like midwives, they also learned from older, more experienced healers, but with more of a view to general health. I should mention in regard to these that they were pretty much left alone by the Church, as prosecutions for witchcraft were rather rare in the Middle Ages and active witch hunts only began after the Middle Ages ended.

Answer 2

Medieval doctors use plants as medicines and use their local resources like boiling as a form of sterilization.

Answer 3

barber shop surgeons did not need any education in medicine. doctors had to train for many years and they studied arithmatic, greek and latin.