Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlin.

Last week, we looked at the future of treating snake bites.

But for today's little episode, we're going back in time.

To medieval Europe, where doctors were trying to treat snake bites in the bizarrest of ways.

So let's paint a picture here.

There's big castles around, peasants working the land.

While the local aristocracy prenced around with pets, like squirrels.

They were very popular at the time and you would keep them on little leashes with little collars

and you would take your squirrel out for walks.

Oh, you must have fun at work.

The one having fun at work is Kathleen Walker-Megel from King's College London.

She studies animals in the Middle Ages.

And several years ago, she was reading through these super old texts from around the 1300s.

And she kept noticing one animal coming up again and again.

Not squirrels, but snakes.

In so many of these medical texts, I would see

recipe after recipe of what to do when you've been bitten by a venomous snake.

And this was weird because these nerds went into a ton of detail, page after page.

About venomous snake bites.

And a lot of them were living in Western Europe, which is not exactly snake central.

Your chances of getting bitten by a venomous snake are very rare.

It's sort of an obsession almost, it sounds like.

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