Our new issue is about Medicine and Health through the Ages. Although our present knowledge cannot take us very far back in time, it helps us to see the solutions developed by mankind over the course of a few millennia, as it was faced with health problems such as diseases and injuries.
Medicine has a long journey, starting in prehistoric periods with the development of primitive surgery and the empirical observations of animals and nature, which led to the identification and use of medicinal plants. Middle Paleolithic Neanderthal burials in Shanidar Cave, situated in Northern Iraq, present evidence for the medicinal use of plants approximately 60.000 years ago. One of the oldest types of information we have about medicine is brain surgery (trepanation), an operation performed on the skull of a living or dead individual with certain purposes and techniques, from the Neolithic Period onwards.