Matt Kaplan

And no one had really done that before Galileo, and it was a really big deal.

Well, it really started with Galileo.

And then from that point forward, researchers started trying to analyze the world around them.

But different fields of science analyze things in different ways.

Medicine was a catastrophe.

So in medicine, during the Renaissance, researchers in Britain rediscovered

the ways of Hippocrates.

Now, Hippocrates was a Greek medic, or at least we think he was.

There's not a lot of evidence as to whether or not he actually existed.

But the notion of the humors was rife during the Greek period.

The humors was the sense that, oh, you're ill with a fever.

You have bad blood or too much blood.

Let's drain that bad blood out of you.

Put some leeches on it.

Oh, man.

But you know what's so crazy about the bleeding was that we mock folks who did it.

But if you had a fever, if you have a fever and I attach 50 leeches to your abdomen, I guarantee you that fever will go down.

You might die in the process because you're being drained of blood.

But your temperature goes down, so they believed they were treating it.

But there were also a lot of notions back during the ancient Greeks like, oh, you've got too much phlegm, so let's put you in a hot, steamy room and have you get the phlegm out.