Medicine during the Middle Ages was composed of a mixture of existing ideas from antiquity and spiritual influences. Therefore, in this period, there was no tradition of scientific medicine, and observations went hand in hand with spiritual and religious influences. Ideas about the origin and cure of disease were based on factors such as destiny, sin, and heavenly influences. As people became obsessed with their souls, they neglected their bodies medicine became a matter of faith and prescriptions became prayers. Suffering was seen as part of the human condition. No one contradicted such world view it was accepted. The Roman Catholic Church stated that illnesses were punishments from God and those who were ill were so because they were sinners. Any view different from the established Roman Catholic view was labeled heresy and punished accordingly. The Roman Catholic Church effectively dominated what direction the medical world took. The Church quickly gained converts – and power – throughout Western Europe. The center of Western learning shifted to Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which had been Christian since the 4th century AD, with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine. Medical knowledge stagnated in the Middle Ages and did not develop until the 17 th/18 th centuries. The Ancient Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians had pushed forward medical knowledge, but after the demise of these civilizations, artistic, cultural, and scientific outputs were sadly lacking when compared to both earlier and later times. “The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” ended when Rome fell to Germanic tribes in the 5th century AD.
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