Medicine wasn’t even systemized until right before WWI and even then it barely had structure. Universities didn’t even teach medicine because it wasn’t considered a science. You’d learn it like a trade without any sort of oversight or regulation. Imagine how pathetic the medical infrastructure we had was for WWI and the 1918 Influenza pandemic. We did NOT have even remotely enough qualified doctors and nurses.

You could say that medicine really took off right alongside of vaccinations. As they proved to be one of the most effective means of fighting disease in human history. Before that was mainly insanity like using mercury, bloodletting and arsenic to treat disease... The history of medicine is both super old but also super young!