This course is an exploration of health, disease, and medicine in the ancient world, going from about 500 BCE to about 500 CE. While the course is primarily focused on the Greek and Roman world, we will frequently touch on several other ancient traditions, such as those of the Ancient Near East, India, and China. A Reacting to the Past game/simulation unit will give us an opportunity to study the reception of Greco-Roman medical ideas in medieval Europe. Like real historians, we will work with the messy, but fascinating, surviving ancient evidence (texts and archaeological data). Through a combination of lecture and classroom discussion we will explore broad topics that will help us patch together a history of ancient medicine: e.g., understandings of health and underlying theories of how bodies functioned, common diseases and treatments, practitioners and standards of practice. A critical approach will guide us in confronting some of the frustrating features of our ancient evidence: incomplete preservation, difficulties of attribution and dating, difficulties of interpretation, standards of handling evidence different from our own, unchecked biases, underrepresentation of different socio-economic categories, etc.