Actually, in the field of medicine, in the Western world, really nothing good happened at the times between the Christians came to the power and until the Italian Renaissance, check any good history of medicine. And it was really only because of the dogmatic approach that Christians had.
Also, for professional historians, "dark ages" don't mean something "bad" but is a term used to refer to some historical period of some observed area where there's significantly less information on which history can rely to. It's not judgemental, it reflects the facts. And yes, there were periods when the most cities or the infrastructure of some region broke completely.
Here's one look at the fact that for almost 200 years there were no coins in England:
And of course it's a local effect, the Eastern Roman Empire at the same time functioned as a real state and produced new money. And some periods can "go dark" for us not because of something occurring during some time but because something later destroyed most of the evidence.
"Paracelsus grew up during a period of Renaissance humanism"
"He is also a famous revolutionary for utilizing observations of nature, rather than referring to ancient texts, something of radical defiance during his time."
Is that a myth? And still:
"Much of his theoretical work does not withstand modern scientific thought, but his insights laid the foundation for a more dynamic approach in the medical sciences."
Had the medicine been good before him, it would be even better afterwards, but we can actually evaluate the quality of his achievements and therefore we get the idea how it was before.
We can even use much more recent example, Semmelweis, died 1865:
"Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis' observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings. Semmelweis' practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory."
Well, yes. The second article I linked to quotes several physicians explaining the importance of observation hundreds of years before Paracelsus lived. And the fact that people were performing dissections hundreds of years before the Renaissance is a clear demonstration that they knew the value of observation.
>We can even use much more recent example, Semmelweis, died 1865
This example only goes to show that there was nothing special about the medievals. New advances in science are often initially rejected by the scientific community.
The second article gives some quotes, but does their mere existence change anything, if the medical science remained where it was even in 1541, or much later? Apart from learning that some people wrote something clever, is there any evidence to some meaningful results? That's what counts. I don't see them still. Until then, I don't consider the poor state of medicine between Galen and Renaissance a myth.
The periods of the strong religious dogma de facto existed and they really significantly limited the advance of sciences. The opposition to science is strong even in the present times among the "fundamentally" religious. It surely wasn't better before.
> There was certainly progress in anatomical knowledge
Are there any preserved books with the anatomical drawings that can prove that or something equivalently indisputable? I've expected some link already.
EDIT, what follows is written after your post that mentions de Liuzzi: I don't see how he actually supports your claim of a visible progress before Renaissance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondino_de_Liuzzi -- an Italian who died 1326 (14th century) and the Renaissance is considered to originate in Italy in late 13th and to include 14th century. Moreover:
"He is often credited as the “restorer of anatomy” because he made seminal contributions to the field by reintroducing the practice of public dissection of human cadavers and writing the first modern anatomical text."
How come he had to "restore" anatomy at all?
EDIT2: And what were the reasons for the poor state of medicine between Galen and Renaissance when not the religious/dogmatic ones (as in "the Bible says how God made a man and the animals, separately")? We see these arguments even now.
EDIT3: Just like you admit "beginning of Renaissance" I admit I formulated somewhere my view of poor state of medicine as "between Galen and Renaissance" which even (probably wrongly) includes some years between Galen and the Christian dominance, and I still stay behind the point of my claim: there's an immense period of time where we don't have any good example of functioning scientific approach to the medicine, and the fundamentalist understanding of Bible was the very significant cause for that.
EDIT4: Your "printing press" excuse doesn't correlate with all the progress in antique and also at the start of the Renaissance (and before the printing press), the very example you gave, but my "religion" argument not only correlates with the "dark medicine ages" but also with many source texts that we can read. So I still see your arguments more as wishful thinking than anything else. You can't excuse the religion holding on to the "it's written in this fine book, and that's it."
EDIT5: You can disprove my claim of "poor medicine" for many centuries influenced by the Christian dogma if you can quote some text or drawings made between cca 300-something AD and 1200-something AD of any author actually correcting Galen who died 216 AD and who made very obvious errors in his own writings. His writings were dutifully copied through almost 1000 years but, to my knowledge, not corrected during all these centuries until the Italian times you link to. The times also known as Renaissance. We can nitpick the dates, but nobody can refute that Renaissance actually existed. How can I prove that it's religion that suppressed the science? Simply because the written (and other) material available to history shows people spending immense energy to the religious questions, but not to the science. That's the main period we can observe that in that amount. During these times the Church surely didn't have to explicitly forbid something that simply nobody did. They've spent the energy on "heresies" they were confronted to -- like was Jesus ever made or was he always his own father, are the icons allowed, stuff like that. You consider that "not fundamentalist," call it what you want, it was the religion-and-dogma-caused blindness for science.
Mondino de Luzzi's Anathomia corporis humani, written in 1316 and based on dissection of cadavers.
edit: The other links I gave indicate that dissection was practiced earlier. The reasons for it not being more widely practiced were not primarily religious. As the articles make clear, the church never banned dissection.
You are right of course that the early 14th century is technically the very beginning of the Renaissance by most definitions, but the standard myths have it that dissection was still banned by the church much later than that. The misinterpreted papal edict that supposedly banned dissection was issued in 1299, so if you're going to be pedantic about time periods, you'd have to say that it's the Renaissance that suffered from a ban on dissection and not the medieval period!
>And what were the reasons for the poor state of medicine between Galen and Renaissance when not religious?
Scientific progress ebbs and flows for all kinds of reasons. I should think the invention of the printing press played more of a role than religion. Note also that dissection was banned in many non-Christian societies:
>there's an immense period of time where we don't have any good example of functioning scientific approach to the medicine, and the fundamentalist understanding of Bible was the very significant cause for that.
You've provided no evidence in support of this claim. It seems to be something that you're just going to keep insisting on, so I'm not sure how to respond. The "fundamentalist" understanding of the Bible did not exist in the medieval period, when only highly educed people read the Bible. It has its origins in the 19th century as a consequence of mass literacy and the translation of the Bible into the vernacular hundreds of years previously.
>Your "printing press" excuse doesn't correlate with all the progress in antique and also at the start of the Renaissance (and before the printing press), the very example you gave, but my "religion" not only correlates with the "dark medicine ages" but also with many source texts that we can read.
I don't understand what you mean by "religion" here. Religion existed in Ancient Greece and it existed during and after the Renaissance. You'd need to show specific evidence that specific religious institutions in medieval Europe played a significant role in impeding the progress of medicine, in a way that they did not before or since.
> How can I prove that it's religion that suppressed the science? Simply because the written (and other) material available to history shows people spending immense energy to the religious questions, but not to the science.
I don't see how that proves anything. At most, if it is true, it proves that people were overall more interested in religion than science. That obviously doesn't show that religion was suppressing science. People are nowadays much more interested in reality TV and Facebook than they are in science, but we wouldn't take that to be evidence of "suppression".
>You can disprove my claim of "poor medicine" for many centuries influenced by the Christian dogma if you can quote some text or drawings made between cca 300-something AD and 1200-something AD of any author actually correcting Galen who died 216 AD and who made very obvious errors in his own writings
The second article I linked to already did that:
[...] the year 1200, when a famine broke out in Egypt. While thousands of people died, it was also an opportunity for ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (d.1213) and other physicians to find out the answer to an anatomy problem. According to the writings of Galen the lower jaw bone was made up of two bones. Al-Baghdadi and the other medical experts disagreed, and with all these corpses around they thought of making a study of them. They arranged to see over two thousand skulls to observe their jaws before making their determination – all of them had a lower jaw made up of one bone, not two – and they then had a second group of physicians come in to verify their findings.
Ah yes, the parrot wasn't dead because after he was lying on the floor for almost a thousand years, once he had been prepared to be cleaned away we can view it as it was his own voluntary movement. And he was just resting. Good. I've understood the nature of your arguments, I have no more questions and don't expect anything more in this discussion.
Also, for professional historians, "dark ages" don't mean something "bad" but is a term used to refer to some historical period of some observed area where there's significantly less information on which history can rely to. It's not judgemental, it reflects the facts. And yes, there were periods when the most cities or the infrastructure of some region broke completely.
Here's one look at the fact that for almost 200 years there were no coins in England:
http://www.numsoc.net/darkages.html
And of course it's a local effect, the Eastern Roman Empire at the same time functioned as a real state and produced new money. And some periods can "go dark" for us not because of something occurring during some time but because something later destroyed most of the evidence.