Toby Wilkinson: evaluation

Transcript context

…How good was the medicine back then? Let’s say they could set my broken leg, but if I’m sick and I just show up, is my doctor’s visit even positive expected value, or are they more likely to harm me than help me? I think we would be pleasantly surprised by the sophistication of medical understanding at this time. There were ancient Egyptian papyri on medicine dating back many, many centuries before the Ptolemies came to the throne. These looked in detail at all sorts of different afflictions, and whether or not they could be treated, and if so, what the recommended treatments were. I’ll give you one example: migraine. Now, we think of a migraine as a relatively Western, modern phenomenon, a medical condition, but actually, the ancient Egyptians recognized it, described it. They came up with a word for it: half-head, migraine. They developed very sophisticated electrical treatments for migraine involving an electric discharge from the head of a catfish. A Nile catfish emits a low-level electric discharge, and the ancient Egyptians had discovered that applying this to the head of a migraine sufferer could have a beneficial therapeutic effect. Goodness me, it wasn’t until the 20th century that modern medicine rediscovered the importance of electricity in terms of neural pathways. Yes, they were very sophisticated. Should we do this today with the catfish?…

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