Medicine through the Ages: From Acupuncture to Antibiotics

by Michael Woods, Mary B. Woods

Overview

Ancient civilizations developed advanced medical techniques and devices that helped to improve and extend people’s lives. Uncover the innovation and ingenuity of ancient medical technology and learn how it laid the groundwork for modern medicine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798765625200
Publisher:	Lerner Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/01/2024
Series:	Technology through the Ages
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.25(d)
Age Range:	12 - 14 Years

About the Author

Michael Woods is a science and medical writer whose nationally syndicated newspaper stories and columns have won numerous national awards. He directs a program at the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, to inform the public about science. He and his wife, Mary B. Woods, have written almost forty books together. Michael is the writer, and Mary is the researcher.

Mary B. Woods is an elementary school librarian in the Fairfax County (VA) Public School system. She has presented at international librarians' conferences. Mary has worked with her husband, Michael Woods, to write almost forty books. She is the researcher, and Michael is the writer.

Editorial Reviews

2023-11-04
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. (timeline, glossary, index, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 11-18)

Kirkus Reviews