Healthy History Stage 6 Comprehension PDF

STAGE 6 Unit focus: Healthy Bodies Text focus: Information Text Healthy History Human beings have always known what was best for their bodies, or at least, that’s what they thought! In the search for medical cures and to keep their bodies healthy, humans have, over the course of history, done such s...

STAGE 6 Unit focus: Healthy Bodies Text focus: Information Text Healthy History Human beings have always known what was best for their bodies, or at least, that’s what they thought! In the search for medical cures and to keep their bodies healthy, humans have, over the course of history, done such strange things as getting rid of most of their blood, a aching electrical wires to their bodies and literally blowing smoke into people’s bo oms! Let’s take a journey into some of the more bizarre ways that people have tried to keep each other healthy. A puff of smoke Nowadays, if somebody passes out, drowns or otherwise needs reviving, we might try to resuscitate them through the mouth (while making sure an ambulance is called, of course). However, back in the 1700s, British doctors believed that the best way to revive people was to blow smoke into their rectum using a bellows. This was such a common treatment that bellows were hung alongside major rivers, such as the River Thames, in case people fell in and needed reviving. Much like people know where defibrillators are nowadays, people who lived close to rivers knew the location of the bellows in case they were needed. The smoke used contained nicotine, much like cigare es, because doctors thought that the nicotine would cause the heart and lungs to work faster and help the patient! Don’t get blood on the carpet It probably doesn’t need to be said, but you need your blood. It’s pre y important and best left inside your body if you can. Unfortunately, that knowledge hasn’t always been the case. As recently as the late 1800s, doctors were still using blood-letting as a cure for many illnesses, much like doctors had for the 3,000 years before them. This process involved cutting the patient and allowing a lot of their blood to run out. What they didn’t realise was that, instead of helping to cure the illness, it was actually putting significantly more stress onto the body. This made many of the illnesses much worse and often resulted in a severe case of death! Anybody who did get be er afterwards did so in spite of the blood-letting, not because of it. Rea e um http://www.literacyshedplus.com C u r r ic ul Th all resources ©2023 Literacy Shed und A ding ro I’ll have that brain if you don’t mind The brain is still one of the least understood organs in the body. Scientists and doctors don’t fully understand large parts of it even today. That didn’t stop doctors in the past thinking they’d got it sussed. Unfortunately, this led to some rather drastic cures. Depression, epilepsy and other emotional or mental illnesses have been misunderstood for centuries. Many people were consigned to terrible conditions in asylums because they were considered too distressing for other people. In the 1930s, a scientist named Walter Freeman thought he’d found a cure for all of these illnesses. It became known as the prefrontal lobotomy. He believed that destroying or removing the front of a person’s brain would stop all of these illnesses. At first, he did this by drilling a hole in the patient’s skull and cutting into the brain. After that, he used a small, metal spike and hammered it through a patient’s eye socket into the brain. Needless to say, it didn’t cure anything. Most patients were left with severe brain damage and needed full-time care; around 15% died. Despite this, he was allowed to perform 3,439 lobotomies across the United States before he was finally stopped in 1967. He even performed one on the sister of the future president, John F. Kennedy. RETRIEVAL FOCUS 1. When did people use smoke bellows? 2. Which river is given as an example of a place where they could be found? 3. For how long had doctors been blood-letting? 4. Give an example of a specific illness that Walter Freeman might have “cured” with a lobotomy. 5. How many lobotomies did he carry out? I S V V I VIPERS QUESTIONS What evidence is there in the text to support the opening sentence? Why didn’t blood-letting work? Which word in the text means that somebody has everything all worked out? Find and copy a phrase that means “it doesn’t need saying”? Why might somebody have preferred to have a lobotomy? all resources ©2023 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com