Early History of Science, Medicine and Technology
You should answer four questions in total. Answer one question from
Section A and three questions from Section B. All questions carry equal
weighting.
Begin each answer on a separate sheet.
Write legibly and on only one side of the paper.
Answers must be tied up in separate bundles, marked 1, 2, 3, etc.
according to the number of the question.
Attach a completed coversheet to each bundle and complete a master
coversheet listing all questions attempted. It is essential that you write
your examination number and not your name on the coversheet and on
each bundle.
You may not start to read the questions printed on the subsequent
pages of this question paper until instructed to do so by the
invigilator.
Page 2 of 2
SECTION A
1. How did increased contact between Europe and other continents change
European natural knowledge?
2. Whom would a well-to-do patient consult for a cure in the early modern
period?
3. How did the Ancient tradition shape the development of science and
medicine?
SECTION B
4. On what sources of information did ancient Greeks and Romans rely in
treating scientific topics?
5. What was “medieval” about medieval medicine?
6. How was knowledge exchanged between Chinese and non-Chinese
medical practitioners between 1300 and 1700?
7. How important was money in early modern medical encounters?
8. Discuss the role of women in early modern medical practice.
9. “The next care to be taken, in respect of the Senses, is a supplying of
their infirmities with Instruments, and, as it were, the adding of artificial
Organs to the natural; this in one of them has been of late years
accomplisht with prodigious benefit to all sorts of useful knowledge, by
the invention of Optical Glasses” (Robert Hooke, Micrographia). Discuss.
10. Why did natural philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries perform experiments?
11. What was the significance of chemistry to the practice of medicine in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
12. How do archival sources shape historians’ interpretations of the history
of early medicine?