MEDICINE THROUGH THE AGES

An overview of medical practices and advances from early days to…somewhat later days.

The co-authors define technology as “the use of knowledge and inventions to make human life better” and continue on, in that same blandly optimistic vein, to survey the state of classical and traditional medicine in various cultures from ancient Greece and Rome to India, China, and the Americas (“thousands of different cultures” are acknowledged, although the seven-page overview offers little room for differentiation); except for Egypt, Africa doesn’t make the cut. Readers may be surprised to learn that doctors in ancient India used giant biting ants to suture ruptured intestines, thus preventing infections, and that ancient Greek surgeons could “safely amputate limbs.” But the authors neglect to mention that wholesale bloodletting wasn’t just an ancient practice but common up through the late 19th century. Those hoping for a glimpse of modern medical wonders will be disappointed since, notwithstanding a moderate amount of editing to the text, this refurbished version of the Woods’ 2011 volume Ancient Medical Technology rushes through the 18th and 19th centuries and stops at the discovery of antibiotics in 1928—with not much beyond an annotated list of more recent books tacked on to the end of the original edition’s stale selected bibliography, covering the last century or so of innovation. The illustrations offer an assortment of ancient sites and artifacts.

An anemic retread.