Medicine men in Peru practise trephination, cuttting holes in the skulls of brave or foolhardy patients

The Indian physician Susruta pioneers plastic surgery of the nose

Indian medical theory maintains that the body consists of three humours - spirit, phlegm and bile

Hippocrates, on the Greek island of Kos, founds an influential school of medicine

The Alexandrian school of medicine develops an alarming form of clinical anatomy – human vivisection

The practice of acupuncture is described in Nei Qing, a Chinese medical text

The Roman surgeon Cornelius Celsus describes in De Medicina how to cut stones from a patient's bladder

A new doctor, Galen, is appointed to look after the gladiators at Pergamum

Medieval Europe's first institute of higher education is established, with the founding of the medical school at Salerno

The first illustrated manual of surgery is written by Abul Kasim, an Arab physician in Cordoba

Leonardo da Vinci begins an unprecedented series of detailed anatomical drawings, based on corpses dissected in Rome

European diseases bring death on a massive scale to an American population that has no immunity

Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius publishes a seven-volume work which for the first time lays bare human anatomy

Ambroise Paré, the greatest surgeon of his day, publishes an account of how to treat gunshot wounds

William Harvey publishes a short book, De Motu Cordis, proving the circulation of the blood

Samuel Pepys has a two-ounce stone cut from his bladder, in an operation carried out at home in the presence of his family

The first recorded attempt at blood transfusion, at the Royal Society in London, proves that the idea is feasible

The first successful human blood transfusion is achieved in Paris by Jean Baptiste Denis, apparently saving the life of a 15-year-old boy

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, observing the Turkish practice of inoculation against smallpox, submits her infant son to the treatment

English obstetrician William Smellie introduces scientific midwifery as a result of his researches into childbirth

Austrian physician Joseph Leopold Auenbrugger describes his new diagnostic technique – percussion, or listening to a patient's chest and tapping

Captain Cook publishes his discovery of a preventive cure against scurvy, in the form of a regular ration of lemon juice

Benjamin Franklin, irritated at needing two pairs of spectacles, commissions from a lens-grinder the first bifocals

William Withering's Account of the Foxglove describes the use of digitalis for dropsy, and its possible application to heart disease

In Berkeley, Gloucestershire, Edward Jenner inoculates a boy with cowpox in the pioneering case of vaccination