Modern medicine is amazing!  The knowledge used to treat complex medical conditions has been amassed from years of painstaking research, trial and error. But it wasn’t always like that. In the thousands of years before all of this meticulous data was collected, the art of healing included some wild conjecture, a mishmash of opinion, assumption, leaps of logic, more than a few crazy ideas, and thankfully the occasional bucket of common sense.

In this activity we’ll looks at odd, hopeless, and downright dangerous cures; the development of surgery; archaic medical devices, and the inventions of some we recognize today. Students will explore the role of trends in medicine – both useful and dangerous, meet some major league medics from Hippocrates to Marie Curie, and try their hands at some surgical skills!