Ancient Discoveries - Season 6 - Eps 5: Gruesome Medicine
Explores ancient medical techniques and possible new applications in the modern era. Techniques reviewed include blood letting by leeches, reading from a torpedo fish, trepanning to relieve pressure on the brain, and Roman battlefield surgery and tools. Other items reviewed include how snake venom was used as medicine and using replica tools and virtual surgery in a computer to see how an arrow was removed from the skull of Prince Henry V of England.
About Ancient Discoveries
Title: Ancient Discoveries
First Air Date: 2003-12-21
Last Air Date: 2009-12-28
Status: Ended
Rating: 9/10 (from 6 votes)
Language: EN
Seasons: 6
Total Episodes: 42
Network: History
Genres: Documentary
Production Companies: Unknown
Synopsis
Ancient Discoveries was a television series that premiered on December 21, 2003, on The History Channel. The program focused on ancient technologies. The show's theme was that many inventions which are thought to be modern have ancient roots or in some cases may have been lost and then reinvented. The program was a follow-up to a special originally broadcast in 2005 which focused on technologies from the Ancient Roman era such as the Antikythera mechanism and inventors such as Heron of Alexandria. Episodes of the regular series expanded to cover other areas such as Egypt, China and East Asia, and the Islamic world. Ancient Discoveries was made for The History Channel by Wild Dream Films based in Cardiff in the UK. Much of the filming was done on location across the world. The series used contributions from archaeologists and other experts, footage of historical sites and artifacts, computer generated reconstructions and dramatized reconstructions along with experiments and tests on reconstructed artifacts.
Cast
Sean Barrett
