Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Travel back in time 400 years to the stinky, sticky world of Tudor medicine – where doctors didn’t wear gloves and surgery was done with saws (yes, actual saws).

Join Dr Alanna Skuse as she reveals the craziest cures for the most atrocious ailments: from boiling oil for gunshot wounds to petrified toads for the plague! Packed with gruesome stories, yucky facts and horrible history, this talk will make you glad you live in the 21st century. Warning: not for the faint-hearted!

About the speaker:

Alanna Skuse is a literary scholar and historian whose work focuses on seventeenth-century medicine and ideas about the body. She has written three academic books and recently launched her first popular history book, The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack: How to Stay Alive in Renaissance England.

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