Ah, the dawn of medicine in the Mediterranean and the Americas! A charming time where ailments were blamed on angry deities and grumpy demons, and the cure often involved chants, prayers, and enough drilling to make your head spin (literally).
Imagine a priest, doubling as your doctor, diagnosing your headache as a demon trapped in your skull. The solution? Trepanation, baby! That's right, drilling a neat little hole in your noggin with a sharpened flint, hoping the demon would take offense and hightail it out. Talk about letting the bad vibes out!
And don't worry, they had anesthesia – a "lovely" concoction of herbs and plants that probably made you forget your headache by making you see dancing gnomes instead. Of course, some unfortunate souls didn't survive the "treatment," but hey, you win some, you demon-evict some, right?
But it wasn't all skull-boring and troll-banishing rituals. Medicine, bless its curious heart, started to evolve. They noticed that certain foul-smelling, bitter concoctions seemed to consistently relieve specific ailments. This, my friends, was the birth of actual medicine, fueled more by observation than angry sky gods.
So, the next time you pop an aspirin, remember its wild ancestors: trepanning, demon-deterring potions, and the sheer bloody-mindedness of early healers who dared to experiment (sometimes at their patients' expense). Now, excuse me while I go gargle some garlic in case a demon tries to hijack my afternoon nap.
Source Encyclopedia of Trivia
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