Fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages

A short post on how the fall of the Roman Empire led to a decline in medicine/public health in Europe. 
History - Medicine through time - AD300-500

In AD359 the empire split into East and West (as any RTW player will know).  In AD410 the Goths invaded Italy and sacked Rome.  In AD476 a Germanic chieftain deposed the Roman Emperor.  The last Roman troops left Britain about AD410.

Britain was no longer controlled by the Pax Romana, so it began to fall apart. The Roman infrastructure (e.g. sewage systems and aqueducts) stopped working and some villages became Saxon settlements. Heating systems stopped working and bands of Saxon invaders attacked most towns.

Those with the knowledge of how to build aqueducts or how to treat illness died, and nobody was trained to replace them, therefore the knowledge was lost apart from a very small number of books which made their way into Arabic Libraries via the Nestorians.

For more information on the Nestorians and how knowledge was preserved after the sack of Rome read the 'Islamic Medicine' post.