Ancient Medicine

From Sorcery to Surgery

written by Michael Woods and Mary B. Woods

Runestone Press, 2000

Genre: Children's nonfiction

Reading Level: Ages 12+

96 pages

This interesting book goes through the different medical practices of the Stone Age, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient China, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome. I don't want to explain every topic, but I'll give a few of my favorites. One of the medical procedures from the Stone Age was called trepanation. This is when physicians would drill holes in people's skulls to reduce pressure or stop internal bleeding, while this could lead to infection and eventually death, based on some skulls from that time is is obvious that some people survived and actually starting healing. Something that I found interesting about the Ancient Egyptians was that they only performed minor surgeries because they believed that when a person died, for them to get into the afterlife their body had to be fully intact. In Ancient India when a physician operated on someone's intestines after war, or being gored by an animal, they would get weaver ants and hold ants along the incisions to clamp down and then cut off their bodies, these supplied stitches that didn't let any bacteria out. The Last thing i found really interesting was that in Ancient Rome a physician named Galen developed the test of taking the patient's pulse.

I would recommend this to any child interested in history or medicine

I think that some parents would be a little wary of their children reading this because some of it seems a bit graphic.

I thought this book was well put together but somewhat boring. I found the facts interesting but had too much information about it that I didn't really care about.

My rating 2 out of 5