Browsing through the archives of Archaeology on this very wet Greek day, I pause to read a piece called “Artful Surgery” by one Anagnostis P. Agelarakis. The subtitle states: “Greek archaeologists discover evidence of a skilled surgeon who practiced centuries before Hippocrates.”

The remains of a woman excavated by Eudokia Skarlatidou in the Clazomenean colony at Abdera in Thrace, Greece show that she had been treated for a serious head wound sometime before 600 BC. Agelarakis concludes that the “surgical practises described in [Hippocrates‘] treatise On Head Wounds were already in use two hundred years before the “Father of Medicine” was born.