Source Analysis Practice

📜 Source Analysis Practice

Applying NOP Analysis:

Nature: A medical treatise — a professional textbook written to instruct trained physicians on how to diagnose and treat patients using the humours theory.

Origin: Written by Galen of Pergamon, c.175 AD, a Roman physician appointed as personal doctor to Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He was the most authoritative medical writer of the ancient world and wrote approximately 500 works on medicine.

Purpose: To codify and teach the humours system to practising physicians. As an official medical text, it was intended to standardise treatment across the Roman Empire and establish Galen as the definitive authority.

Grade 9 Model Paragraph:

This source is useful for an enquiry into medieval medical ideas because it directly demonstrates the humours theory that dominated medicine for 1,400 years. Galen prescribes bleeding (venesection) for excess blood and purging for excess bile, which confirms how treatment was designed to restore humoral balance. However, its utility is limited because it tells us nothing about how medieval doctors actually applied these ideas — the source shows the theory, not its practice in a medieval English context, such as a doctor consulting an astrological chart before bleeding. Own knowledge tells us that Galen's works were endorsed by the Church as confirming God's design, which is the reason this source had such lasting influence, but Galen himself cannot account for that later Church enforcement.