Special Features

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You are to be apprenticed to a Barber / Surgeon, Physician, Herbalist (Apothecary) to staff a new hospital.

Consider:

- Name of your guild? Who is allowed into your guild? Special features of your guild? Terms and vocabulary unique to your guild's work? Special clothing that your guild members must wear? Why?

- Who have been the innovators in your field of study? What has each contributed of significant importance? Where did each master get his ideas? Any special study that he did, place he visited, things he observed and applied to what he is passing on to you? Particular problems your guild faces? What artwork has your guild been required to commission? What donations is your guild responsible for and why? What should be kept secret and why?

Course of study? What books will you be using? By? Philosophy of medicine? Philosophy about disease, curing disease, and hygiene? Based on whose ideas or what beliefs? What will your role be as barber, physician, herbalist? What is the patient's role? Skills and techniques you must learn or know about? Artists who have helped your field of study? Math: needed? for what? What mathematical 'news' is there that will help you?

Steps of a process that you must learn? Materials needed for your line of work? Accepted methods of treatment for specific diseases, in particular, the Plague? Cautions, hazards in your line of work?

What precautions are you taught to take for yourself? for your patients? Technology (tools) available? What innovative technology will be built into your work or have others discovered to meet special needs? (14th to 17th century versions of 20th century technology? Is the older better? In what ways?) Solutions that have been tried?

What guilds work with yours? Why this method of organization?

What have you learned that 20th century doctors, dentists, or pharmacists use today as a result of ideas, discoveries, and techniques from the Renaissance (or what the Renaissance borrowed from earlier centuries)?