GCSE History (UK)
UK GCSE History deck (Years 10-11, AQA/Edexcel/OCR) covering Medicine through time, Weimar and Nazi Germany 1918-1939, Superpower relations and the Cold War 1941-1991, Elizabethan England c.1568-1603, and Norman England 1066-1100. Builds AO1 knowledge, AO2 explanation and significance, and source/interpretation awareness.
Ämne: Historia · Nivå: Högstadium (13–15) · 400 kort
Innehåll
- The Theory of the Four Humours held that the body contained four fluids — blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile — and that illness was caused by an imbalance between them.
- Hippocrates (c.460-370 BC), an ancient Greek physician, developed the Theory of the Four Humours and promoted clinical observation; the Hippocratic Oath is named after him.
- Galen (c.129-216 AD), a Greek doctor in Rome, developed the Theory of Opposites to treat humoral imbalance and dominated Western medical thinking for over 1,300 years.
- Galen's Theory of Opposites treated an imbalance with its opposite — for example, a cold illness (too much phlegm) was treated with hot foods like pepper.
- The medieval Catholic Church preserved Galen's ideas because they fitted the belief in a soul, but it also banned dissection and discouraged challenges to old authorities, slowing medical progress.
- Medieval people believed disease could be caused by God as a punishment, by the position of the planets (astrology), or by 'miasma' — bad air or smells.
- The Black Death reached England in 1348-49, killing roughly a third to half of the population. People blamed God, miasma and the planets, and tried prayer, herbs and fleeing as 'cures'.
- Medieval physicians often diagnosed illness by examining a patient's urine against a chart (a urine wheel) comparing its colour, smell and taste.
- Bloodletting (phlebotomy) and purging with laxatives were common medieval treatments aimed at restoring the balance of the four humours.
- Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) published 'On the Fabric of the Human Body' (1543), based on human dissection, correcting many of Galen's anatomical errors.
- Vesalius proved that the human jaw is one bone, not two as Galen claimed, and that the breastbone has three parts — showing Galen had dissected animals, not humans.
- William Harvey (1578-1657) proved in 1628 that the heart acts as a pump and that blood circulates around the body in one direction, disproving Galen's idea that the liver made new blood.
- Harvey's discovery of circulation showed that bloodletting was based on false theory, though it took a long time for doctors to abandon the practice.
- Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), the 'English Hippocrates', insisted on careful observation of symptoms rather than relying on theory, helping classify diseases such as scarlet fever.
- The invention of the printing press (c.1440s) helped spread new medical ideas, like those of Vesalius, far more quickly and accurately across Europe.
- Edward Jenner (1749-1823) developed the world's first vaccination in 1796, using cowpox to protect against smallpox after noticing milkmaids who caught cowpox did not get smallpox.
- In 1796 Jenner tested his theory by infecting James Phipps, an 8-year-old boy, with cowpox and then exposing him to smallpox; the boy did not catch the disease.
- The word 'vaccination' comes from the Latin 'vacca' meaning cow, reflecting Jenner's use of cowpox. The British government made smallpox vaccination compulsory in 1853.
- Jenner could not explain WHY his vaccine worked because germ theory had not yet been discovered, which made some doctors distrust it.
- John Snow (1813-1858) proved in 1854 that cholera was spread by dirty water, not miasma, by mapping deaths around the Broad Street water pump in Soho, London.
- John Snow had the handle of the Broad Street pump removed, after which cholera deaths in the area fell, supporting his water-borne theory.
- Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), a French scientist, published Germ Theory in 1861, proving that microbes in the air caused decay and disease, disproving spontaneous generation.
- Pasteur developed 'pasteurisation' (heating liquids to kill microbes) and later vaccines for chicken cholera, anthrax and rabies.
- Robert Koch (1843-1910), a German doctor, identified the specific microbes that caused tuberculosis (1882) and cholera (1883), founding the science of bacteriology.
- Koch used agar jelly to grow bacterial cultures and dyes to stain and photograph microbes, developing techniques that let scientists identify many disease-causing germs.
- Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) reformed nursing during the Crimean War (1854-56), cutting death rates at the Scutari hospital by improving hygiene, ventilation and cleanliness.
- Nightingale's book 'Notes on Nursing' (1859) and her Nightingale School of Nursing at St Thomas' Hospital (1860) made nursing a respected, trained profession.
- Before anaesthetics, surgery was done while patients were awake; surgeons worked fast and many patients died of shock or pain.
- James Simpson discovered in 1847 that chloroform could be used as an anaesthetic to put patients to sleep during surgery and childbirth.
- Chloroform use became respectable after Queen Victoria used it during the birth of her son Prince Leopold in 1853.
- Anaesthetics caused a temporary rise in deaths — the 'Black Period' of surgery (c.1846-1870) — because surgeons attempted longer, deeper operations without controlling infection.
- Joseph Lister (1827-1912) introduced antiseptic surgery in 1865, using carbolic acid to kill germs on wounds and instruments, dramatically reducing post-operative deaths.
- Lister was inspired by Pasteur's germ theory; he chose carbolic acid because it was already used to treat sewage and reduce its smell.
- Aseptic surgery later replaced antiseptics: operating theatres, instruments and gowns were sterilised so that no germs were present at all, rather than killing them during surgery.
- The 1848 Public Health Act allowed (but did not force) towns to set up local boards of health to improve water and sewers; the 1875 Public Health Act made many improvements compulsory.
- Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident in 1928 when he noticed that mould (Penicillium notatum) on a Petri dish had killed the bacteria around it.
- Howard Florey and Ernst Chain developed a way to purify and mass-produce penicillin in 1940-41, turning Fleming's discovery into a usable drug.
- Penicillin was mass-produced in the USA from 1942, especially to treat wounded soldiers in the Second World War, becoming the first widely used antibiotic.
- The National Health Service (NHS) was set up in 1948 by Health Minister Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, providing healthcare free at the point of use for everyone in Britain.
- The NHS grew out of the 1942 Beveridge Report, which identified 'disease' as one of the 'five giants' the government should fight, alongside want, ignorance, squalor and idleness.
- Many doctors initially opposed the NHS, fearing loss of income and independence; Bevan won them over by allowing them to keep some private patients.
- James Watson and Francis Crick, using Rosalind Franklin's X-ray images, discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, opening the door to genetic medicine.
- The Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, mapped all human genes, helping doctors understand and predict genetic diseases.
- Overuse of antibiotics has led to antibiotic-resistant 'superbugs' such as MRSA, one of the biggest challenges facing modern medicine.
- Modern surgery has advanced through blood transfusions (made safe after Landsteiner identified blood groups in 1901), X-rays (discovered by Röntgen in 1895), transplants and keyhole surgery.
- Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated on 9 November 1918 as Germany faced defeat and revolution; Germany became a republic and an armistice ended the First World War two days later.
- The new Weimar Republic took its name from the town of Weimar, where its democratic constitution was written in 1919 because Berlin was too unstable.
- The Treaty of Versailles (June 1919) forced Germany to accept the War Guilt Clause (Article 231), pay reparations of £6.6 billion, lose land and limit its army to 100,000 men.
- Many Germans hated the Treaty of Versailles and called those who signed it the 'November Criminals', blaming them for a 'stab in the back' (Dolchstoss).
- Proportional representation in the Weimar constitution meant many small parties won seats, making strong single-party government almost impossible and forcing weak coalitions.