# What is the history of medicine?

An episode of [History for Kids / History's Not Boring: The Kids History Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1852047160), 7 Oct 2026, 12 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2555342/episodes/19892867-what-is-the-history-of-medicine.mp3

Have you ever had a bad cough or a scraped knee? Today, a doctor might give you cherry-flavored medicine or a colorful bandage. But what if they told you to rub a crushed-up mouse on your gums or used a jar full of slimy, blood-sucking leeches to cure your fever?! Yuck! Thousands of years ago, before there were hospitals or fancy medical scanners, healing sick people was a wild mix of magic, weird herbs, and total guesses. In this episode, we are traveling back in time to discover the fascinating (and sometimes super gross!) history of doctors and medicine! You'll learn how Ancient Egyptians used moldy bread to heal wounds, why your local barber used to perform surgeries, and how the traditional red and white barber pole got its creepy colors. We'll also meet the brave scientists who realized that washing hands could save lives, and discover how one messy desk accident led to the invention of penicillin! Get ready to explore how brilliant doctors mapped the human body and finally learned to fight off tiny invisible germs!

## Transcript

[0:45] SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Histories Not Boring by Kidopoly.com.
[0:50] SPEAKER_00: I'm Mira.
[0:51] SPEAKER_00: And I'm Finn.
[0:53] SPEAKER_00: Before we begin, we have some huge shout-outs today.
[0:57] SPEAKER_00: A big hello to Lily in Perth and Arjun and Ira in the Bay Area.
[1:02] SPEAKER_00: And hello to Micah, plus brothers Rory and Logan in Auckland.
[1:07] SPEAKER_00: We also want to welcome eight-year-old Addison, six-year-old Rhett, and almost three-year-old Clark in Manhattan Beach, California.
[1:16] SPEAKER_00: And a huge hello to Harrison, age 10, and seven-year-old twins Harvey and Hagen, listening in Aarhus, Denmark, who love their two huskies.
[1:26] SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening every morning, boys.
[1:28] SPEAKER_00: All of these amazing listeners asked us the exact same question.
[1:33] SPEAKER_00: What is the history and origin of doctors and medicine?
[1:37] SPEAKER_00: Great pick, everyone! If you haven't already, tap follow wherever you're listening so you never miss an episode.
[1:44] SPEAKER_00: Finn, imagine waking up with a terrible fever, but instead of giving you cherry-flavoured medicine, your doctor hands you a jar of slimy leeches and tells you to crush up a beetle.
[1:56] SPEAKER_00: How would you feel?
[1:57] SPEAKER_00: Ugh, no way! I would run away and hide under my bed.
[2:02] SPEAKER_00: Was that real?
[2:04] SPEAKER_00: It absolutely was.
[2:06] SPEAKER_00: Today, doctors use advanced scanners and powerful medicines.
[2:10] SPEAKER_00: But thousands of years ago, healing was a bizarre mix of magic, herbs, and some really wild guesses.
[2:18] SPEAKER_00: Wild guesses?
[2:19] SPEAKER_00: When you're sick, you don't want a wild guess.
[2:23] SPEAKER_00: True, but it took thousands of years of brave scientists making mistakes, looking inside bodies, and discovering invisible germs to get to the medicine we have today.
[2:34] SPEAKER_00: Our story starts in ancient Egypt, over 4,000 years ago.
[2:39] SPEAKER_00: Back then, there were no hospitals or medical schools.
[2:43] SPEAKER_00: So who did you go to if you broke your arm?
[2:46] SPEAKER_00: You'd go to a healer.
[2:47] SPEAKER_00: The very first doctor, whose name we actually know, was an Egyptian man named Imhotep, who lived around 2600 BC.
[2:57] SPEAKER_00: Wait, we know his exact name from over 4,000 years ago.
[3:01] SPEAKER_00: We do! He was so brilliant that after he died, the Egyptians actually worshipped him as a god of healing.
[3:09] SPEAKER_00: And we even have an ancient medical book from Egypt called the Iber's Papyrus.
[3:14] SPEAKER_00: A papyrus?
[3:15] SPEAKER_00: Like a giant paper scroll?
[3:17] SPEAKER_00: What did it say?
[3:19] SPEAKER_00: It was written around 1550 BC, and it's massive! It's a scroll measuring 65 feet long.
[3:26] SPEAKER_00: That's as long as a bowling lane.
[3:29] SPEAKER_00: Whoa! How many medical tricks were on a scroll that long?
[3:33] SPEAKER_00: It contained over 700 magical formulas and remedies.
[3:37] SPEAKER_00: Some were brilliant, like putting mouldy bread on wounds.
[3:41] SPEAKER_00: The mould naturally fought off infections.
[3:43] SPEAKER_00: Mouldy bread?
[3:45] SPEAKER_00: Gross.
[3:46] SPEAKER_00: But I guess it's better than getting sicker.
[3:48] SPEAKER_00: What else?
[3:49] SPEAKER_00: Well, to cure a toothache, it suggested crushing up a mouse and applying it to your gums.
[3:55] SPEAKER_00: Okay, never mind.
[3:56] SPEAKER_00: Take me to a different ancient doctor.
[3:59] SPEAKER_00: Anywhere but there.
[4:00] SPEAKER_00: Let's jump forward to ancient Greece, around 400 BC.
[4:04] SPEAKER_00: This is when a man named Hippocrates changed everything.
[4:08] SPEAKER_00: He said diseases weren't curses from the gods, but had natural causes.
[4:13] SPEAKER_00: That sounds much smarter than the mouse idea.
[4:15] SPEAKER_00: Did he get it right?
[4:17] SPEAKER_00: Mostly no.
[4:18] SPEAKER_00: He believed the body was filled with four liquids called humours blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
[4:26] SPEAKER_00: He thought you got sick because your liquids were out of balance.
[4:30] SPEAKER_00: Liquids out of balance?
[4:32] SPEAKER_00: So how did they try to fix it?
[4:34] SPEAKER_00: That led to one of the most common medical treatments for over 2,000 years: bloodletting.
[4:41] SPEAKER_00: Doctors would actually drain blood from sick patients, thinking it would balance their humours.
[4:47] SPEAKER_00: Drain their blood?
[4:49] SPEAKER_00: But you need your blood to live.
[4:51] SPEAKER_00: That must have made them weaker.
[4:53] SPEAKER_00: It did.
[4:54] SPEAKER_00: But people truly believed it worked.
[4:57] SPEAKER_00: And in the Middle Ages, around the 1100s and 1200s, the people doing this weren't even doctors.
[5:03] SPEAKER_00: They were barber surgeons.
[5:06] SPEAKER_00: Wait, a barber?
[5:08] SPEAKER_00: The person who cuts your hair?
[5:10] SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
[5:11] SPEAKER_00: You could go in for a haircut, a tooth pulled, and a quick surgery all in one trip.
[5:17] SPEAKER_00: That's actually why traditional barber poles are striped red and white.
[5:21] SPEAKER_00: The red stood for blood, didn't it?
[5:23] SPEAKER_00: Oh, that is so creepy.
[5:26] SPEAKER_00: Yes, the red represented blood, and the white represented the bandages.
[5:31] SPEAKER_00: And if they didn't want to cut you, they'd attach squirmy, blood-sucking leeches to your skin.
[5:37] SPEAKER_00: Okay, so when did doctors finally start figuring out how the body actually works?
[5:42] SPEAKER_00: A massive turning point happened in 1543.
[5:46] SPEAKER_00: A scientist named Andreas Vesalius published a book full of incredibly detailed drawings of the inside of the human body.
[5:54] SPEAKER_00: Didn't they already know what was inside us?
[5:56] SPEAKER_00: Not really.
[5:57] SPEAKER_00: For over a thousand years, doctors relied on old Roman books that were actually based on dissecting apes and pigs, not humans.
[6:06] SPEAKER_00: Versalius proved those old books were full of mistakes.
[6:10] SPEAKER_00: So he basically drew the first real map of the human body.
[6:14] SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
[6:15] SPEAKER_00: It was.
[6:16] SPEAKER_00: But even with a map of the body, people were still dying from infections.
[6:21] SPEAKER_00: And nobody knew why.
[6:23] SPEAKER_00: Because the real enemy was completely invisible.
[6:26] SPEAKER_00: Invisible?
[6:27] SPEAKER_00: You mean germs?
[6:29] SPEAKER_00: They didn't know about germs yet.
[6:31] SPEAKER_00: Nope.
[6:32] SPEAKER_00: Up until the 1800s, people thought diseases were caused by bad smells called miasma.
[6:38] SPEAKER_00: So doctors didn't even wash their hands before surgeries.
[6:42] SPEAKER_00: No hand washing?
[6:44] SPEAKER_00: That is the worst idea ever.
[6:46] SPEAKER_00: In 1847, a doctor in Vienna named Ignals Semmelweiss realized that when doctors washed their hands with chlorine, fewer patients died.
[6:56] SPEAKER_00: He begged other doctors to wash up.
[6:58] SPEAKER_00: And they listened to him, right?
[7:00] SPEAKER_00: Because it saved lives.
[7:02] SPEAKER_00: Nope.
[7:03] SPEAKER_00: The other doctors were insulted.
[7:05] SPEAKER_00: They thought a gentleman's hands couldn't possibly spread disease.
[7:09] SPEAKER_00: It wasn't until scientists like Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister came along in the 1860s that things changed.
[7:16] SPEAKER_00: What did they do?
[7:18] SPEAKER_00: Pasteur proved that tiny invisible germs cause diseases.
[7:22] SPEAKER_00: And Joseph Lister started spraying an antiseptic chemical called carbolic acid in his operating rooms in 1865.
[7:30] SPEAKER_00: I bet that killed the germs.
[7:32] SPEAKER_00: It did! The number of people surviving surgery skyrocketed.
[7:37] SPEAKER_00: But humanity still lacked a weapon against infections inside the body.
[7:41] SPEAKER_00: Until a messy scientist made a mistake in 1928.
[7:46] SPEAKER_00: A messy scientist?
[7:48] SPEAKER_00: Who?
[7:48] SPEAKER_00: Alexander Fleming! He left a Petri dish out while on vacation.
[7:53] SPEAKER_00: When he came back, mould had grown on it.
[7:56] SPEAKER_00: But right around the mould, all the deadly bacteria were destroyed.
[8:00] SPEAKER_00: Wait, mould?
[8:02] SPEAKER_00: Like the ancient Egyptians using mody bread.
[8:05] SPEAKER_00: Exactly! That mould was called penicillium.
[8:08] SPEAKER_00: Fleming had just discovered penicillin, the world's first true antibiotic.
[8:14] SPEAKER_00: So one messy desk accident basically saved millions of people.
[8:19] SPEAKER_00: Yes! During World War II alone, penicillin saved countless soldiers from infections.
[8:25] SPEAKER_00: Because of antibiotics, vaccines, and better surgery, human life expectancy has literally doubled since the 1800s.
[8:33] SPEAKER_00: That is amazing! Doctors today are practically superheroes.
[8:37] SPEAKER_00: Want to hear some really weird medical fun facts from history?
[8:41] SPEAKER_00: As long as it doesn't involve crushing up mice.
[8:45] SPEAKER_00: Thousands of years ago, if someone had a terrible headache, a healer might perform trapanation.
[8:52] SPEAKER_00: That meant drilling a literal hole in their skull to let the evil spirits out.
[8:57] SPEAKER_00: A hole in the head?
[8:59] SPEAKER_00: I think I'd rather just keep the headache.
[9:01] SPEAKER_00: Here's a less scary one.
[9:03] SPEAKER_00: Do you know why doctors wear stethoscopes to listen to your heart?
[9:06] SPEAKER_00: Because they can't hear it from across the room?
[9:09] SPEAKER_00: Well, before 1816, doctors just pressed their ear right against the patient's chest.
[9:15] SPEAKER_00: But a French doctor named René Lennec was too shy to put his ear on a woman's chest, so he rolled up a paper tube to listen through.
[9:24] SPEAKER_00: And that became the first stethoscope.
[9:26] SPEAKER_00: He invented a totally new tool just because he was embarrassed.
[9:31] SPEAKER_00: That is hilarious.
[9:32] SPEAKER_00: History is full of funny accidents like that.
[9:35] SPEAKER_00: From Egyptian scrolls to high-tech hospitals, learning how the body works has been the longest, most important puzzle humans have ever solved.
[9:45] SPEAKER_00: Alright, Finn, time for the quiz.
[9:47] SPEAKER_00: Are you ready?
[9:48] SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm ready.
[9:50] SPEAKER_00: Hit me with those facts.
[9:52] SPEAKER_00: First question.
[9:53] SPEAKER_00: What was the name of the ancient Egyptian doctor who lived around 2600 BC?
[10:03] SPEAKER_00: Next one.
[10:04] SPEAKER_00: What two colours are on a traditional barber surgeon's pole?
[10:12] SPEAKER_00: Question 3.
[10:13] SPEAKER_00: Before the 1800s, people thought disease was caused by bad smells.
[10:19] SPEAKER_00: What was this called?
[10:23] SPEAKER_00: Here's number four.
[10:25] SPEAKER_00: What life-saving habit did Ignat Semmelweiss try to get doctors to do in 1847?
[10:36] SPEAKER_00: Last question.
[10:38] SPEAKER_00: What world-changing medicine did Alexander Fleming discover from a mouldy Petri dish in 1928?
[10:48] SPEAKER_00: Great job! Let's see how you did.
[10:51] SPEAKER_00: The first answer is his name was Imhotep.
[10:55] SPEAKER_00: For question two, the colours are red for blood and white for bandages.
[11:01] SPEAKER_00: Number three, the answer is it was called miasma.
[11:06] SPEAKER_00: Question four, he told them to wash their hands.
[11:10] SPEAKER_00: And the final answer is he discovered penicillin.
[11:14] SPEAKER_00: Phew! I am so glad I live right now and not back when a haircut came with a surgery.
[11:21] SPEAKER_00: Me too, Finn.
[11:23] SPEAKER_00: No leeches or mouse gums for us.
[11:25] SPEAKER_00: Hey, if you enjoyed learning about the history of medicine today, please leave us a five-star review.
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[11:41] SPEAKER_00: Oh, and we have sister shows too.
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[11:50] SPEAKER_00: If you want a shout-out like the ones today, or just want to tell us your favourite weird history fact, have your parents email us at hello at kidopoly.com.
[12:01] SPEAKER_00: Thanks for learning with us today.
[12:02] SPEAKER_00: See you next time on History's Not Boring.
[12:06] SPEAKER_00: Bye everyone.

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