Paper 1
Early Science and Medicine
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 3
SECTION A
1. What can the study of early instruments reveal about scientific and
medical practices?
2. How did contact across cultures shape the development of medicine and
natural knowledge before 1600?
3. Discuss the major sites for the practice of medicine in the medieval and
early modern periods.
SECTION B
4. Early natural philosophers and mathematicians presented their work in a
variety of types of texts. Why?
5. Historians have sometimes claimed that one of the most significant
differences between Ancient and medieval scientific explanations and
those of later periods is the reliance on empirical (including experimental)
evidence. Discuss, with reference to at least three different sources.
6. How and why did medieval and early modern medical authors look to
Ancient sources?
7. Why did anatomy become so important in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries?
8. Discuss the importance of astrology in medical prognosis in the medieval
and early modern periods.
9. Discuss the relationship between state borders and disease in the early
modern period.
10. Why did early modern physicians criticise other kinds of healers?
11. “Medicine from below”. What does this perspective bring to the history of
medieval and early modern medical encounters?
12. “A time of profound transformation in the science of sexuality” (Londa
Schiebinger, 1993). How apt is this description of the early modern
period?
13. How did the Black Death change medical practices?
14. When would an early modern physician advise his patient and the
patient’s family to call a priest?
Page 3 of 3
15. How might a scholar writing in 1600 describe the difference between a
man’s and a woman’s body?