This comprehensive title presents the history and practices of medical science, covering developments in the field from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into cutting-edge 21st-century techniques. The major branches of medicine are covered, as are more in-depth looks at clinical practice, disease and epidemiology, surgery, and pharmacology. As such, this text gives middle school to high school aged readers a systematic approach to understanding an essential branch of science that they undoubtedly will have encountered in their own lives.