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A flint arrowhead in a human sternum. The arrowhead struck the bone from the front and penetrated deeply enough to reach the heart.

Disease in Antiquity:

• Surgical skills and a rudimentary knowledge of human anatomy were acquired in ancient times, long before there was any understanding of disease.

• Trepanation of the skull, an operation to remove bone pieces and relieve intracranial pressure, is thought to have been successfully practised as long ago as 10,000 B.C.

• The use of sticky resins as forerunners of adhesive tape used in surgical dressings may date from 4000 years ago. In ancient Hindu medicine, insect mandibles were used to clamp wound margins. The use of cautery to staunch wound bleeding may be as old as 3000 B.C.

• The ancient Egyptians practised phlebotomy, circumcision, castration, amputation and, as early as 4000 B.C., wrote albeit inaccurate books on human anatomy.

• From 700 B.C., the Etruscans were producing partial dentures of bridgework.
  

A four thousand year old skull from Crichel Down, Dorset, England, demonstrating a large trepanation wound. Remodelling of the bone at the wound margins indicates that the patient survived the operation, performed using stone tools. The patient retained the circle of bone which was buried with him when he ultimately died.

A dead New World soldier ant, Eciton burchelli, being used to hold the edges of a skin wound together. In the second step of the clamping process, the body of the ant is twisted off. Scale is in mm.

A fine example of Etruscan dental bridgework, 7th-6th centuries B.C. Some examples could be worn during eating. Some could be removed for cleaning; others were permanently attached to the surviving original teeth.

Dentistry of this quality was not practised again until the nineteenth century.