Board Thread:Timeline Discussions/@comment-24473740-20140515123108/@comment-24473740-20140520123704

Pita Kang,

thanks a lot for the link!

I´ve read the Vallejo article, and I´ve come to realise the following...

@all,

I think it`s necessary to be more specific. I´ve got a little carried away (in my new introduction to technological inventions ATL-OTL, too) with a generalised debate about science in the Middle Ages.

It´s obviously not true that there wasn`t any scientific or even technological progress in the Middle Ages. That wasn`t my initial argument, either, and I was wrong to move towards that position implicitly. Of course there was scientific and technological progress: philosophy outlined the major epistemological challenges of all sciences, and then there were inventions like arched buildings, wire drawing, gaffering, eyeglasses, compasses, better windmills, cheaper paper... A timeline without a Christian Middle Age might be forced to have some of these inventions even later than OTL. I´m not disputing that.

I´d like to come back to where this discussion started from:

Is it plausible to assume that, had the Roman Empire reformed itself instead of falling apart and given way to the Middle Ages, MEDICAL progress could have achieved in seven or eight centuries what it had achieved in 15 centuries OTL?

I´ll elaborate on my pro arguments here, so they can be criticised separately:

1.) A very important major paradigm shift in medicine is that from humoralist medicine to anatomy--based medicine. (It occurred in OTL around 1800.) As soon as this paradigm shift is achieved, better experiments and discoveries can be expected. This paradigm shift was severely delayed in OTL due to at least one milennium, in which the taboo of disecting corpses was unquestionable. (And I don`t mean to imply that the Church forbade it - it did, but only very late, when the Middle Ages ended. Before that, it didn`t have to. The taboo was strong enough in itself to keep alchemists, apothecaries and "medics" from cutting dead people open - which the  humoralist paradigm declared unnecessary anyway. But if Christians had remained just a minority, this taboo might not have existed, and curious researchers might have started disecting corpses and discovering the human anatomy much earlier, which would have raised questions and contributed to a more analytical approach to medicine.

2.) Another major foundation for medical progress is biochemical knowledge. The late establishment of natural sciences in OTL is due to technological prerequisites (see 3) and the long domination of transcendental philosophies over empirical approaches. This isn`t a Middle Ages problem, it was a problem of Roman Antiquity already, where the multitude of pre-Hellenistic Greek philosophical schools had melted down into boring, sterile metaphysical Neoplatonism (a weak opponent to Christian thought). The Middle Ages were actually the time when this problem began to be addressed, by Francis Bacon or Albertus Magnus for example, but that was only in the 12th and 13th centuries...

But if Neoplatonism had been challenged not by Christianity, but by an empiricist philosophy like Bacon`s - which in my timeline would be triggered by the requirement of raising productivity due to the abolition of slavery in a still urbanised imperial context, which facilitates a more favourable view of "applied sciences" (in which the Romans were actually good, their culture just never considered them as important as the "humanistic" heritage they had half-heartedly imported from Greece) -, the development of separate, well-staffed and well-funded natural sciences might have come much, much earlier. If the Romans had spent even a third of what they spent on grammarians and rhetoricians on biologists, physicians and chemists, that would have been a lot of resources. (And I say that although I have a Masters and a Ph. D. in Language and Literature, not in Chemistry or Civil Engineering...)

3.) A third prerequisite for biochemical and medical progress are technical devices like thermometers, test tubes, microscopes, Bunsen burners etc.

In my timeline, I draft a quicker development here as built upon an earlier discovery of the distillation of alcohol. (Something the Romans would have loved, I´m sure, like most cultures.) Given Egyptian expertise with glass and the Mediterranean omnipresence of wine, I hope this is not too much of a stretch of the imagination. Distillation, alchemy and apothecaries are related, and they`re also related to glass manufacturing, which in turn is related to optics. I know developments would still take a while. But in Medieval Europe, these experiments and their innovations were conducted in secretive and sometimes obscure circles, partly outside the scientific community and only in part integrated into wider structures of economic application. As Vallejo conceded, they were considered to belong to a sphere better described as "magic". The antiquity was more prosaic and might have provided a better starting ground.

What do you think?