In the Renaissance, some aspects of medicine and doctors were still in a Dark Age. Outbreaks of disease were common, doctors were poor, medicine was primitive and many times doctors would kill a patient with a severe treatment for a minor disease! But, there were other sections where medicine and the use of medications improved greatly. The filth of the cities promoted the spread of disease faster than doctors could discover a cure. This encouraged large outbreaks of many deadly diseases. .
The quality of doctors during the Renaissance was a small step up from the Medieval era. There were a few medical schools that had started and doctors were beginning to have the option of a formal education. The only problem was that people didn't need a license to be a doctor. Many "quacks- practiced medicine. And doctors had no specialization; there were no dentists, no surgeons, and no physicians. So a doctor may have not known anything about one of those areas but still attempted to treat it. In the Renaissance, the church ruled everything. The church thought that if someone was ailing it was because of a demon in them or God punishing them. The people of the Renaissance were also very superstitious. They believed in magic and thought that some of the herbs used in medicine had magical healing powers. Ideas about the cause of disease did not change from the middle ages. Disease sent by god, due to the planets or bad air, or due to imbalance of the humours.
There were several aspects of the Renaissance where medicine improved greatly. Doctors began to study medicine from a scientific standpoint and artists like Leonardo Da Vinci actually dissected human corpses to see what they looked like inside the body. This cleared up much of the previous misconceptions about the internal organs. .
The treatments in the Renaissance improved at a steady rate throughout the period. During the Renaissance, doctors would work on site at the battlefield and would learn from their experiences.
